Alinea Cooking: Pineapple, Bacon, Black Pepper

Before I start with the description of my trials, I need to give a nod to my inspiration: Carol Blymire, the home cook extraordinaire who cooked her way through every recipe in The French Laundry Cookbook and the blogged about it in The French Laundry at Home. She is now attempting the same feat with Alinea at Home. Her motto for this second endeavor is quite endearing:

I'm cooking my way through the Alinea Cookbook. Because I can. I think.

Anyone who has ever looked at the Alinea cookbook will smile at that offhand "I think."

And now, back to today's story.

The first problem was equipment. Besides mundane things that everyone has hanging around the kitchen, like a vegetable juicer, a Chinois, and a blender that can run for 5 minutes to thoroughly incorporate modified starch into pineapple juice, the recipe requires a sheet of clear acetate and a dehydrator. I didn't think my one-speed Oster blender would run for five minutes straight much less make the super-pure starch emulsion that was needed, so I went out and bought a new blender. Since even I have limits, I passed on the blender I really wanted, a $400 Vita-Mix Vita-Prep, and settled for a reconditioned Breville Ikon Blender. Wow! I saved $300 already. After I ordered an Excaliber 2400 dehydrator, I stopped by an art supply store and picked up a roll of .005-inch acetate. That took care of the equipment.

Next, I needed ingredients. Pineapples can be had in grocery stores, as well as saffron, sugar, salt and bacon, but Pure-Cote B790 modified starch, citric acid, and Tapioca Maltodextrin are a bit harder to scare up.

Pure-Cote B790, according to the postmodern pantry wiki is "A modified food starch produced from corn by Grain Processing Corporation. It forms clear, flexible films without requiring hydration or cooking. Products thickened with Pure-Cote dry into a crispy "glass" at room temperature." Tapioca Maltodextrin, according to the same source, "... stabilizes high-fat ingredients, transforming them into powders. Since it dissolves in contact with moisture, the ingredients reconstitute in the mouth."

Fortunately, I live in San Francisco, the current home of Le Sanctuaire, the mecca of molecular gastronomy shops. After a fifteen-minute walk and a ride up and then down the world's smallest elevator (go ahead, visit Le Sanctuaire, you'll see), in one hand I had a jar of Pure-Cote B790, and in the other, a monster zip-lock bag of Tapioca Maltodextrin. After begging some citric acid from a winemaker friend, I was ready to cook!

Or, I thought I was ready to cook. It turns out that the recipe for Pineapple, Bacon, Black Pepper in the Alinea cookbook is broken. The proportions of pineapple juice to Pure-Cote starch are wrong. Fortunately, I read about this little problem and also saw a pointer to MadridFusion.Net which does have an accurate recipe. (From the Madrid Fusion home page, click on "Master Recipes" and then navigate to Pineapple Glass and Bacon Powder.) Besides the correct recipe, you'll see a picture of these ethereal airy packets of pineapple-glass wrapped bacon powder. Mine didn't look that that. More later.

To make pineapple glass you trim a pineapple and feed the flesh to a vegetable juicer producing pineapple juice. Then you strain it through a Chinois into a sauce pan and add saffron, salt, sugar and citric acid. Next you strain it through a Chinois into the blender. With the blender running, you add the Pure-Cote B790 starch, and (this is a detail I found somewhere on the Internet) let the blender run on high speed for five minutes... NOT A SECOND LESS! Then you strain THAT through a Chinois (I used my SuperBag) into a container. At this point you can rest for a bit and get up your courage for the next step.

.... which is pouring the pineapple juice mixture on to a sheet of acetate which you have secured on the countertop. Here's a picture of what a granite countertop covered with acetate, covered with pineapple juice looks like (if you click on any of the pictures, a larger version should pop up in a new window):

You are then exhorted to let this dry overnight at which point you can separate the film from the acetate. The next morning the pineapple juice was still sticky, wet, and easy to poke holes in with your finger (ask me how I know). Not dry. Not a bit dry. I keep my place in the low to mid 60's most of the time, and clearly this wasn't going to give me pineapple glass any time soon. I found a fan, and set it on the other side of the stove pointing toward the wet acetate. I then turned on two burners and the fan and hoped for the best. After a few hours, the surface of the film felt dry, so I tried to peel it off of the acetate. This didn't work very well, either. The pineapple was stuck to the acetate like peanut butter on brioche. All I was able to do was tear a few scraps from the edges. Dispirited, I turned off the stove and the fan and left the acetate on the counter for future disposal.

Here's what the pineapple glass looked like, "dry" but still on the acetate sheet.

The next day, after getting back from work, I tried once again to get the pineapple film off of its acetate prison. This time, I was somewhat more successful. It still caught and tore, but the pieces were bigger and I managed to get large enough pieces to make fourteen 3-inch x 3-inch squares. I assume that it takes a long time to dry. However, the next time I try this recipe, I am going to spray the acetate with non-stick cooking spray and then wipe off the excess before I pour on the pineapple juice mixture.

The film at this point is flexible, but quite strong. I found it was much easier to cut it to size with shears than by trying to cut it with a knife. I tasted it, of course. It was very chewy, kind of like a fruit leather, and it stuck to my teeth.

Next, I needed to make some bacon powder. Here, the recipe in the book might be correct (I'd given up on it by this time) but if you follow the recipe for the bacon powder at Madrid Fuision (650g of bacon fat) you will end up with enough bacon powder for 100 packets. You don't need anything near 650g of bacon fat. This wasn't a problem as I usually use the microwave oven to cook bacon and not only did I not have one and one-half pounds of bacon fat sitting around in the refridge, I didn't have any. Fortunately, this was easily fixed, I cooked bacon for three days running and saved the fat. Then instead of discarding the bacon, since it isn't needed for this recipe, I ate it. Worse things have happened. I may make this recipe again, as I do love the by-product! Three days of bacon gave me 90g of bacon fat. That amount of bacon fat mixed into 35g of Tapioca Maltodextrin plus some salt and pepper gives you a big pile of bacon powder that looks like this:

I tasted this too. It's light and fluffy, like confectioners sugar, and sweet which I suppose comes from converting the starch into sugar in the mouth. But it also tastes like bacon and a bit like fat. A friend described it as being like eating a deep-fried doughnut covered in confectioners sugar. That's pretty close, except that it isn't.

The next step is to make one-half inch cubes of bacon powder with your fingers. Placing same in the middle of a pineapple-glass square, you are then supposed to delicately wield an offset spatula to carefully fold over the sides and ends of the square without disturbing the bacon powder cube. This was beyond me in terms of both skill, and time. (Remember #2, above? We are about three and one-half days into this recipe by this point). So I did the best I could. I folded the pineapple around the bacon powder, but the bacon powder got crushed. If you want to know what they should look like, go back to Madrid Fusion. If you want to know what I ended up with, look here:

That was a picture of my fourteen Pineapple, Bacon, Black Pepper packets sitting on the dehydrator tray before being dehydrated for 12 hours at 140 degrees.

Dehydrating the packets is an inspired step. Up to this point the pineapple film was leathery and flexible and not a bit like glass. After 12 hours in in the dehydrator, it was crispy and even a bit fragile. Don't drop them on the floor (ask me how I know). Here is a final picture of the finished product.

I took my collection of bacon powder wrapped in pineapple-glass to a wine-tasting dinner party where I persuaded the guests to try them. Everyone was very polite. I actually think they liked them. I know I did. One person offered that it was "like eating pure sin." I think she liked the bacon fat. Another said he had never tasted anything like it. I had no trouble believing him.

What does it taste like? You bite into a crispy, sweet and tangy skin which crunches through to a creamy, slightly sweet mysterious substance with a deliciously long after taste. It really isn't like anything you have ever eaten before, and I think you'll like it. It is what post-modern cooking should be. It delights the mind, the eye, and the mouth.

So there you have it. The pineapple wrapped bacon powder was delicious, I got to buy some new toys, and taking everything into account, each pineapple-bacon cube only cost $20! What a hobby.

Equipment:
Vegetable Juicer
Blender
Chinois/SuperBag
Acetate Sheet
Dehydrator
Sauce pan
Bowl
Whisk

Ingredients:
Raw whole pineapple
Salt
Sugar
Citric acid
Saffron threads
Pure-Cote B792 (Le Sanctuaire)
Bacon fat
Tapioca Maltodextrin (Le Sanctuaire)