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Chef Maxime Bilet.The Cooking Lab

If you're wondering why the food trend that brought us foamed potatoes, liquid nitrogen semifreddos and steak simmered in a plastic bag for 36 hours (it's called sous vide) went suddenly out of vogue a few years ago, I suggest you peruse pages 80 through 87 of Volume III of the monumentally ambitious, breathtakingly awesome, but - dare I say - critically flawed cooking tome to end all cooking tomes, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.

Read Rob Mifsud's defence of Modernist Cuisine here. PLUS: Think you're a foodie? Take the Globe's quiz

After a fascinating disquisition on the role of collagen in braising (more is better) and an illustrated technique for gluing de-fatted duck skin onto a duck breast using a substance called Activa RM (a "transglutaminase preparation"), there is a hamburger recipe. Or, should I say, a hamburger manual.



Here is a gross oversimplification: Cook the patty in a Ziploc bag to a "final core temperature" of 56C (about 30 minutes), dip in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds, then deep-fry in oil at 232C for one minute.

As for the patty itself, the book recommends a blend of short rib, aged rib eye and hangar steak cut into cubes, chilled to -1C, put through a grinder that has itself been cooled with liquid nitrogen, forced into a cylindrical mould, sliced into disks, then cooked, seasoned and garnished.

You might call this the Platonic ideal of recipes - a formulation as precise and unchanging as an isosceles triangle. According to this school of thought, you can think of a dish as an exalted state that ingredients can reach, but only via the hand of the great creator, the chef. That's why Modernist Cuisine favours precision over that hilariously primitive custom called "cooking to taste."

Alas, there is a problem. Humans may be able to measure quantities of Activa RM down to the nearest microgram and prepare blends of ground beef using exact ratios of short rib and aged rib eye. But nature doesn't work that way.

For example, is that aged rib eye from a 14-month-old barley-fed Charolais steer or a 24-month-old ryegrass-finished Galloway heifer? Because both will feature different profiles of fatty acids and volatile aromatic compounds. And if you use the latter, don't bother with the cylinderizing, liquid nitrogen and deep-frying: Just form a patty with your hands, hit it with sea salt and high heat, and you will discover burger bliss. (And just how many Microsoft stock options do you have to cash in before grinding an exalted cut like rib eye seems like a good idea?)

There's a different school of cooking that sees nature, not humans, as the great creator. A chef I met in Paris put it to me this way: "Cooking is the easy part. A chef's greatest challenge is finding good ingredients." The chef's job is to amplify them. Or, as a scientist might put it: The rate-limiting step isn't the cooking, so much as the thing that's getting cooked.

That's why most of us are more interested in farmers' markets than liquid nitrogen. It's about ingredients, method plays a supporting role. But modernist cuisine - molecular gastronomy, whatever you want to call it - isn't dead. Its techniques live on. Cooking meat sous vide, for instance, used to be extremely trendy, but now it's just one more technique a chef can use, which is a good thing - so long as the chef is sourcing excellent meat.

Mark Schatzker is the author of Steak: One Man’s Search for the Tastiest Piece of Beef.

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