The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [128]
Because Mark lived closest to the venue, we decided to do most of the cooking at his apartment. Between the two of these guys, I couldn’t have had more interesting cooking partners. Over the past month, I’d gotten to know them fairly well. Mark, originally from upstate New York, was a math and English tutor when not planning supper-club dinners. Tall and athletic, he was a fervent runner and health-food fanatic. Michael was a consultant for luxury real estate deals on Long Island, and in part to impress his well-to-do clients, he sported a thick black mustache and had a straight-shooting sort of attitude that drew him comparisons to the title character of the 1970s gangster film Serpico. But his real passion was for food—sensational, delicious food—and for making it by innovative means. One of the first things I helped cook at a dinner by A Razor, A Shiny Knife was smoked avocado slices in Michael’s backyard smoker, to go inside a crabmeat ravioli filling for beet-stained pasta sheets; there was always an immersion circulator holding a vacuum-packed bag of meat going for a slow, moisture-sealed cook, or perhaps speckled quail eggs bobbing about as they poached.
Michael’s culinary heroes included Ferran Adrià, Grant Achatz, and Wylie Dufresne, all chefs who used “molecular gastronomy” heavily in their cooking. In fact, all of us were curious about these novel cooking techniques; a couple of weeks before the Studio BBQ, Michael, Mark, a couple of other friends, and I took a six-hour food-science class taught by a fellow gastronomical geek, Alex Talbot, who writes a blog called “Ideas in Food.” I left with several pages of scribbled notes on chemical additives like methocellulose, hydrocolloids, ratios, and temperatures, and a bellyful of pectin-glued, vacuum-compressed fruit, among other oddities. I wasn’t really sure how much food science was going to measure into my own home cooking—I’d gone along just for fun. But Michael and the rest of the guys were soaking up every word, eager to try out the procedures with new ingredients at home.
At nine o’clock the morning of the barbecue, I arrived at Mark’s apartment to start cooking. There was only one oven, and we’d need to somehow bake enough trays of cornbread for three hundred servings. I was completely making up the recipe for the coconut and banana cornbread that morning. Neither of the guys enjoyed baking much, nor claimed to know anything about it. But we all agreed the dish sounded simple enough to wing on the fly. I got started on a small dish that would be my test batch, mashing up one banana and mixing it with a cup of coconut milk and some eggs. The cornbread that came out of the oven, about thirty minutes later, was soft, dense, and sweet, with its note of tropical flavors. It was perfect, I thought. Plus, we planned to top the finished squares of cornbread with a warm peach compote, to compliment the fruitiness. I set myself on re-creating the exact same proportions from my cornbread test batch, baking tray after baking tray.
I was also in charge of the sesame noodle salad. Again, it would be a classic dish with a twist. For a more colorful, crisp salad, I wanted to add shredded red cabbage, cucumbers, and plenty of fresh scallions to the cold noodles in a sesame-based sauce. I’d made cold sesame noodles countless times throughout my life; it was one of the staple backyard barbecue sides in my household when I was growing up. In recent years, I’d noticed the dish was becoming more popular with the American mainstream—I’d read stories about it in newspapers and on websites. I thought that it would be a hit with the young folks at the barbecue, and Darin and Greg had agreed. I filled the largest pot I could find in Mark’s kitchen with water and brought it to a boil. I’d never dropped four pounds of spaghetti into a bubbling, cavernous pot before then. It was pretty fun. I began stirring it immediately,