[title type="h5"]Wednesday, April 1, 2015.
Keyboard Cuisines, N.O's Most Interesting New Restaurant.[/title]
If you haven't read about it, you've thought about it: wouldn't it be great if food ingredients could be pulled into your kitchen from all over the world through the internet? And then, once it's in house, what if the food could be turned into the most ambitious kinds of finished dishes?
As crazy as that seems, such projects have been in the works for over a decade now. The central appliance is the 3-D printer. Using more or less the same concept that the standard computer printer uses, 3-D printers live up to their name. Many complicated projects--the International Space Station, to name one--can now manufacture parts in space through this technology, thereby solving what could be disastrous problems.
The idea of creating food sensations goes much farther back than the personal computer, though. In the 1950s, a gadget called Smellovision was actually able to release aromas to match those you'd expect to sniff if you were in the room depicted on your television. Smellovision had severe limitations: it could only deliver five aromas, from aerosol cans inside the TV set. But still, people found it amazing, and some developers filed away the concept for future use when the technology improved.
[caption id="attachment_47092" align="alignright" width="258"]
One of the 3-D food printers at Keyboard Cuisines.[/caption]Improve it has. It is now delivering actual hot food--not just the aromas but the food itself--at the new Keyboard Cuisine, opened last week in the Broadmoor neighborhood.
When I first heard about it from a radio listener a few days ago, I laughed. Even if the system worked in creating edible food from what is essentially a computer printer, how good could the food be? Really. The novelty will no doubt pull in hundreds of customers (there is already a line of a few dozen people every day). But duplicating natural flavors--as Chef (and Ph.D in Physics and Computer Logic) Chun Lis says he can--seems farfetched at best.
Chef Chun nodded at my doubt, and challenged me to a blind tasting of a traditionally-cooked Cajun crawfish etouffee and a duplicate of the dish printed by The Creator (as he calls his machine). He even let me cook the etouffee myself.
When I finished (side note: crawfish are looking and tasting very good now, at last), I spooned some of my dish into an insulated coffee mug that I fetched from my car. We then went to the corner of the "kitchen" (it looks more like a boiler room for selling SEO services). He asks me to put a little of my dish into the analyzer. How much? "Size of a pea," he says. Add a crawfish tail? I ask. "Doesn't matter," he says. "We have hundreds of times more biodata than we need right here."
I look over the gadget and spoon in the sample. He walks me over to the other side of the room, where a somewhat oversize printer is already humming. In back of it are ranks of funnel-shaped reservoirs, looking something like the jellybean dispensers at the supermarket.
This is our first successful food printer," he said. "It takes 128 elements and, using the data the analyzer gave us of your etouffee, it combines and processes them to make an exact duplicate. Think of the reservoirs as being like the ink cartridges on your old inkjet paper printer."
After about fifteen seconds, we hear two short bleats--like VW Beetle horns heard in the distance. "Ready to cook?" asks Chun. I nod. He pushes a button and the sound of a fan revving up begins. I see a plastic bowl begin to inch out of the machine. "Since this is a semi-liquid, the printer is also creating a cup to hold the etouffee--and aha! Can you smell the aroma?
I can. "I am producing an etouffee as much like yours as I can," says Chun. "However, I could add more salt, more Tabasco, more onions, more crawfish stock--each of which would also be printed out as it goes."
The bowl is finished being created, and a conveyor belt rolls it out. It is steaming. The bowl itself is just warm. "Taste it," Chun says. I put my spoon in and take a bite, then another. It is quite good, I tell him.
[caption id="attachment_38046" align="alignnone" width="400"]
Crawfish etouffee printed out.[/caption]
Then I raise my coffee mug, with its conventionally cooked etouffee. "Go for it," says Chun. I insert my spoon, and taste it again, with the printed etouffee's aftertaste still in my mouth. The flavors are different. But not much different. Indeed, there's less difference between the two than there would be had I made two separate batches by my mother's recipe.
"That's what I was about to tell you!" Chun says. "It's closer than you could get by any other method!"
So, we have a crawfish etouffee here for. . . what price?
"Using the standard restaurant food-cost percentage, for the ingredients we used, I would have to sell this for about a dollar and a quarter."
For a whole cup of etouffee? "No!" he says. "For all you can eat. The cost of the ingredients I used just now is essentially zero. Now the machines. . . they add a good bit. If I figured that in, and if I sold, say a hundred of these a night for a year, the price would have to be around five dollars. But after a year, I suspect I will have better machines and better ingredients, and I might be able to do the dollar-and-a-quarter all-you-can-eat thing. But now that you've seen that I am not faking this, let's sit down and have a full dinner."
We begin with a dozen raw oysters. Even the shells came out of the food printer. Then jumbo lump crabmeat Remick, with the most enormous and tenderest lumps, and not a fleck of shell.
[caption id="attachment_38627" align="alignnone" width="222"]
Turtle soup, printed out.[/caption]
Now turtle soup. "I am especially proud of this," says Chun. "The species of turtle that makes the best turtle soup are all endangered now. Restaurants have had to use veal and the like. But without killing even one turtle, here we are, eating a turtle soup that is an exact duplicate of the real thing!"
He winks. "Now if only we can get Brennan's to bring back its old recipe, we'd be getting somewhere!"
Next is red snapper with a brown butter and capers. Whole fish. Wow. Creamed sorrel on the side. Followed by a twenty-two ounce sirloin strip steak, rare. "I want you to look at the middle of this," says Chun. "Other than true Kobe beef, have you ever seen such marbling? Now tell me you've ever in your life eaten a better steak. And I will tell you that this will cost you two dollars, and you or anybody else can bring home another one on the house. It costs me almost nothing, so why should I rip you off?"
Roasted squab with a sauce made with Domaine de la Romanee- Conti La Tache, 1989. Don't tell me you can duplicate expensive old wines, I ask. Chun shrugs his shoulders and smiles. "Why not?"
And then he really blows my mind. Bananas Foster, built inside of a goddam computer printer, flames and all!
"Just two things left to figure out," Chun says. "Crowd control is a problem. You see the line outside. There has been some violence. But when other restaurants shift to printing their food instead of burning gas and sticks and grease the way the cavemen did, that will even out. Second problem: we need to expand the number of ingredients. We have figured out about two hundred and put then in glass jars. But I don't want to fool with that side of the operation. We're talking to the Vietnamese chefs about making out ingredients for us. They understand."
I have another potential issue, I tell him. How do the chefs feel about this?
Just that moment, a frozen pork belly flies through the front window of Keyboard Cuisine's dining room.
"There's a chef now," he says. They'll come around, though, after they get a look at the mathemetics."
[title type="h5"]Keyboard Cuisines. Broadmoor Corner Toledano at N. Earhart Blvd. Lunch and dinner seven days. Reservations required: 504-524-0348. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris April 01, 2015 12:01 in
