Culinary innovator Dave Arnold spoke with UW-Madison students and community members about new techniques and changing culinary mindsets Wednesday.
Continuing the semester’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Arnold shared his love of combining food and technology by discussing his soon-to-be-released book “Liquid Intelligence” and demonstrating new culinary approaches.
He began his lecture by explaining the importance of “cooking analytically,” stressing the importance of adapting to new cooking technology and trusting one’s intuitions in the kitchen.
Arnold made the value of intuitions apparent by demonstrating the difference between eggs cooked at different temperatures with an immersion circulator, which he described as the “biggest revolution in cooking in the last several hundred years."
Immersion circulators, which are excellent for precise low-temperature cooking, can be used to prepare foods over long periods of time.
He cooked the eggs for the same period of time in the circulators, and only changed the temperatures at which they were cooked. He proved that by changing the temperature only by one or two degrees Celsius the consistency of the egg would be completely different.
These circulators can also cook a piece of meat for days without overcooking it, a fact that opposes standard culinary conventions, Arnold said.
“Proteins, in fact, will not overcook. They won’t. As long as you don’t exceed a specific temperature,” he explained. “It is really a function of temperature that determines whether or not something is going to be moist or it’s going to be dry”.
Using a vacuum sealer to expand and collapse a marshmallow, Arnold also touched on the fact that many cooks struggle with air trapped inside the food they are preparing.
“The food that we use has hidden air on the inside,” he said. “It’s difficult to get that air out … and the air also has a difficult time getting back in.”
Other topics Arnold discussed were the distinction between boiling point and cooking pressure, the flawed use of oil as an effective heat conductor and the overall importance of understanding the connection between cooking intuitions and practice.
“You learn much faster with your hands and with your experience if they’re connected to an idea of what’s going on,” he said.
