Homaro Cantu + Ben Roche: Cooking as alchemy

Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way.

Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro.

BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto

opened in 2004, people didn't really know

what to expect. A lot of people thought

that it was a Japanese restaurant, and

maybe it was the name, maybe it was

the logo, which was like a Japanese

character, but anyway, we had all these

requests for Japanese food, which is

really not what we did. And after about

the ten thousandth request for a maki roll,

we decided to give the people

what they wanted. So this picture is

an example of printed food, and this was

the first foray into what we like to call

flavor transformation. So this is all

the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know,

a standard maki roll, printed onto

a little piece of paper.

HC: So our diners started to get bored

with this idea, and we decided to give them

the same course twice, so here we actually

took an element from the maki roll and

and took a picture of a dish and then

basically served that picture with the dish.

So this dish in particular is basically

champagne with seafood.

The champagne grapes that you see are

actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of

seafood and some crème fraiche and the

picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter)

BR: But it's not all just edible pictures.

We decided to do something

a little bit different and transform flavors

that were very familiar -- so in this case,

we have carrot cake.

So we take a carrot cake, put it

in a blender, and we have kind of like

a carrot cake juice, and then that went into

a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create

this hollow shell of carrot cake

ice cream, I guess, and it comes off

looking like, you know,

Jupiter's floating around your plate.

So yeah, we're transforming things into

something that you have absolutely

no reference for.

HC: And here's something we have no

reference to eat. This is a cigar, and

basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of

a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these

spices that go into the pork shoulder,

we fashion that into ash. We take

the sandwich and wrap it up in

a collard green, put an edible label

that bears no similarity to

a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it

in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge

you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter)

HC: Delicious.

BR: That's not it, though.

Instead of making foods that

look like things that you wouldn't eat,

we decided to make ingredients

look like dishes that you know.

So this is a plate of nachos.

The difference between our nachos

and the other guy's nachos,

is that this is actually a dessert.

So the chips are candied,

the ground beef is made from chocolate,

and the cheese is made from a shredded

mango sorbet that gets shredded

into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese.

And after doing all of this

dematerialization and reconfiguring

of this, of these ingredients, we realized

that it was pretty cool,

because as we served it, we learned that

the dish actually behaves like the real thing,

where the cheese begins to melt.

So when you're looking at this thing

in the dining room, you have this sensation

that this is actually a plate of nachos,

and it's not really until you begin tasting it

that you realize this is a dessert, and

it's just kind of like a mind-ripper.

(Laughter)

HC: So we had been creating

all of these dishes out of a

kitchen that was more like

a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and

the next logical step for us was to install

a state-of-the-art laboratory,

and that's what we have here.

So we put this in the basement, and we

got really serious about food, like

serious experimentation.

BR: One of the really cool things about

the lab, besides that we have a new

science lab in the kitchen, is that,

you know, with this new equipment, and

this new approach, all these

different doors to creativity that we never

knew were there began to open, and so the

experiments and the food and the dishes

that we created, they just kept going

further and further out there.

HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation,

and let's actually make some cool stuff.

You see a cow with its tongue hanging out.

What I see is a cow about to eat something

delicious. What is that cow eating?

And why is it delicious?

So the cow, basically, eats three basic

things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley,

and so what I do is I actually

challenge my staff with these crazy,

wild ideas. Can we take what the cow

eats, remove the cow, and then make

some hamburgers out of that?

And basically the reaction tends to be

kind of like this. (Laughter)

BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine,

Chris Jones. This is not the only guy

that just flips out when we assign

a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas,

they're hard to understand.

They're hard to just get automatically.

There's a lot of research and a lot of

failure, trial and error -- I guess, more error --

that goes into each and every dish,

so we don't always get it right, and it takes

a while for us to be able to explain that

to people.

HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I

staring at each other, we came up with

something that was pretty close

to the hamburger patty, and as you can

see it basically forms like hamburger meat.

This is made from three ingredients:

beets, barley, corn, and so it

actually cooks up like hamburger meat,

looks and tastes like hamburger meat,

and not only that, but it's basically

removing the cow from the equation.

So replicating food, taking it into that

next level is where we're going.

(Applause)

BR: And it's definitely the world's first

bleeding veggie burger,

which is a cool side effect.

And a miracle berry, if you're not familiar

with it, is a natural ingredient, and it

contains a special property.

It's a glycoprotein called miraculin,

a naturally occurring thing. It still freaks

me out every time I eat it, but it has a

unique ability to mask certain taste

receptors on your tongue, so that primarily

sour taste receptors, so normally things

that would taste very sour or tart,

somehow begin to taste very sweet.

HC: You're about to eat a lemon,

and now it tastes like lemonade.

Let's just stop and think about the

economic benefits of something like that.

We could eliminate sugar across the board

for all confectionary products and sodas,

and we can replace it with

all-natural fresh fruit.

BR: So you see us here cutting up

some watermelon. The idea with this

is that we're going to eliminate tons of

food miles, wasted energy,

and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna,

or any exotic produce or item

from a very far-away place,

with local, organic produce;

so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin.

HC: So if miracle berries take sour things

and turn them into sweet things,

we have this other pixie dust

that we put on the watermelon, and it

makes it go from sweet to savory.

So after we do that, we put it into

a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed,

some spices, and we roll it, and this

starts taking on the appearance of tuna.

So the key now is to make it

behave like tuna.

BR: And then after a quick dip into some

liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear,

we really have something that looks,

tastes and behaves like the real thing.

HC: So the key thing to remember here is,

we don't really care

what this tuna really is.

As long as it's good for you and good for

the environment, it doesn't matter.

But where is this going?

How can we take this idea of tricking your

tastebuds and leapfrog it into something

that we can do today that could be

a disruptive food technology?

So here's the next challenge.

I told the staff, let's just take a bunch

of wild plants, think of them as

food ingredients. As long as they're

non-poisonous to the human body,

go out around Chicago sidewalks,

take it, blend it, cook it and then

have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto.

Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this

and see what they think. (Laughter)

BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task

like this -- this is another one of those

assignments that the kitchen staff

hated us for. But we really had to almost

relearn how to cook in general,

because these are ingredients, you know,

plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with,

and two, we have no reference for how

to cook these things because

people don't eat them.

So we really had to think about new, creative ways

to flavor, new ways to cook

and to change texture -- and that was

the main issue with this challenge.

HC: So this is where we step into the future

and we leapfrog ahead.

So developing nations

and first-world nations,

imagine if you could take these wild plants

and consume them, food miles would

basically turn into food feet.

This disruptive mentality of what food is

would essentially open up the encyclopedia

of what raw ingredients are, even if we just

swapped out, say, one of these for flour,

that would eliminate so much energy

and so much waste.

And to give you a simple example here as to

what we actually fed these customers,

there's a bale of hay there

and some crab apples.

And basically we took hay and crab apples

and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients.

People swore they were eating

barbecue sauce, and this is free food.

BR: Thanks, guys.

(Applause)