Biochemist’s kitchen revolt
Ali Bouzari wants chefs to see one thing: How food works
“I would love to start a revolution.”
Ali Bouzari’s words ring out in the empty dining room at the Progress. Since the Fillmore hot spot is closed during the daytime hours, the high-ceilinged room is uncharacteristically quiet, save for chef-owner Stuart Brioza and the restaurant’s collection of cooks who have come in to work early, just to listen to Bouzari speak.
Bouzari is not a chef or a farmer or any type of new wave culinary artisan. Rather, he is a scientist — a biochemist, to be precise. And with the recent publication of his book “Ingredient” (Ecco; 258 pages; $30), he is also an author. In recent weeks, Bouzari has given similar employee workshops at the country’s most forward-thinking restaurants, including New York’s Eleven Madison Park, Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco spots like Lazy Bear and SPQR, among many others.
He jokes that he earned his Ph.D. in food biochemistry from UC Davis by studying mashed potatoes; that’s technically true, though he’s slightly more reluctant to reveal that he spent time at the French Laundry in order to research how sous vide cooking could give cooks total control over the texture of pureed potatoes. Meanwhile, he taught at the Culinary Institute of America and later co-founded Pilot Research + Development, a food innovation company in Healdsburg. Along the way, he began to collaborate with more of the region’s top chefs.
“My pitch was that I’m a poor man’s Harold McGee with free time and no need for you to pay me,” Bouzari says, referring to the famous food science writer. Bouzari also notes that chefs like Brioza would say that’s a fair deal.
His experiments with chefs ran the gamut, from working with Corey Lee at Benu to figure out why salt from a certain part of Korea creates the crunchiest kimchi (spoiler: high levels of calcium and magnesium) to brainstorming techniques for savory ice cream that is also creamy (when you pull the sugar out, you make it too icy and thin, so you have to add a thickening agent) to discovering the perfect temperature to keep avocados a vibrant green at Bouchon.
Bouzari’s message — and the thesis of his new book — is that every food consists of eight elemental building blocks: water, sugars, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, gases and heat.
“The whole premise of the book is that if you open the face of the watch and you look at all the gears turning, there are only eight kinds of gears in everything,” he says.
Once the user — be it a home cook or a Michelin-starred chef — starts to understand the language and behavior of the eight key ingredients, he says it’s like wearing X-ray-vision goggles as you start to understand how sauces are thickened (by putting obstacles in water’s way), or how crispiness is built (see accompanying story).
Not only does this knowledge enable better cooks, he argues, but also more interesting cooks who look beyond traditional and cultural preparations.
Take, for example, the walnut. Its most common preparation, both in restaurants and homes, usually consists of toasting and sprinkling. Bouzari approaches the walnut differently. It consists of a ton of lipids, carbohydrates and proteins, he notes, “so if we’re talking about making a roux to thicken a gumbo, a roux’s only job is to be brown, toasty and a thickening agent.” Those are physical properties easily replicated by the walnut’s aforementioned building blocks. And by making a “roux” from walnuts instead of the traditional flour and butter combination, Bouzari jokes that the result would also be glutenfree, vegan and Paleo.
“The way we unlock creativity is to stop looking at these things as a walnut, an egg and a tomato — and start looking at them as Swiss army knives,” Bouzari tells the cooks. “My whole life goal is to make the science of food not feel like the science of food.”
“Stop looking at these things as a walnut, an egg and a tomato — and start looking at them as Swiss army knives.” Ali Bouzari, author of food science book “Ingredient.”