Unlocking the crispiness factor
I’ve been a chef fanboy for a long time. I grew up marveling at photos of Thomas Keller making perfect agnolotti in “The French Laundry Cookbook” and salivating during TV segments where Ferran Adrià dove deep into the wonders of Iberian ham. To me, the food at places like the French Laundry and El Bulli didn’t seem to play by the normal rules of our universe. I was pretty sure I needed to send my tongue backpacking through Europe just to become cultured enough to comprehend what that food might taste like.
During my first several years cooking in restaurants, I tasted and made some really great stuff, but it still seemed like Keller and Adrià were making otherworldly stuff. It felt like they were painters who had access to colors that normal humans couldn’t even see.
At this point, I’ve eaten toptier stuff a bunch of times, and I’ve had the incredible opportunity to examine that deliciousness alongside the people who make it. After years of straddling the line between scientific reason and culinary magic, the single most important thing I’ve learned is that the greatest chefs in the world have exactly the same palette of colors to paint with as the rest of us.
Andy Warhol was famously obsessed with Coca-Cola because of the simple fact that no amount of money in the world could procure a better can of Coke than what the average guy on the corner was drinking. If you zoom in beneath the surface of our food, that appealingly democratic idea applies to everything we eat. The gears that turn in our food follow a single set of universal rules, and whether you are No. 1 on the World’s 50 Best list or just have a #1 Best Aunt coffee mug, those fundamental building blocks follow the exact same patterns.
Crispiness is one of those universal patterns. To make anything crispy, you only have to do two things: Add sugars, proteins or carbs and/or remove water and heat. That’s it. This pattern doesn’t care if you’re searing foie gras with your name on your jacket or making 3 a.m. microwave nachos without even wearing pants.
It’s an empowering notion, and to illustrate it better, here’s a quick guided tour of crispiness across a spectrum of Bay Area restaurants. Foldies at Locol: The prices at a fast-food place like Locol — $3 for a foldie, $5 for a burger — are an order of magnitude lower than a Michelin-star restaurant, but crispiness requires no minimum budget. At Locol, the cooks stuff tacos with too much cheese, on purpose, and slap the whole thing on a griddle. The extra cheese falls onto the blisteringly hot flat-top surface, and after a few seconds of searing to bubble away the water, the whole glorious thing gets scooped into a paper sleeve. Once it’s cool enough to handle, the dehydrated protein in the cheese locks into place, adding the best, crispiest parts of a grilled cheese sandwich experience to one of the best tacos you can find anywhere. Fried quail at State Bird Provisions: Taking a traditional approach, the cooks at State Bird dredge local quail in flour, spices and breadcrumbs, and fry it. When the bird hits the oil, the violently high temperature of the fryer creates erupting volcanoes of steam all over the surface of the quail. This, in turns sets the carb- and protein-rich flour into an irregular, astoundingly crunchy topography once the water has been driven off. As with everything crispy, State Bird’s fried quail isn’t best straight out of the fryer but rather a minute afterward, when it’s had a chance to cool and harden (but before water creeps in to corrupt it and make it soggy).
Kimchi glass at Benu: The kitchen crew takes high-quality kimchi, juices it and adds starch. That mixture goes into a dehydrator, which slowly removes water, trapping the added carbohydrates — the starch — in a microscopic traffic jam. This creates a glassy container too stiff to bend when you bite, so it shatters. The key to this technique is the slow and low dehydration. The kimchi would become crispy eventually, regardless of the temperature used, but the gentle heat of the dehydrator ensures that it won’t burn before that happens and avoids bubbles that would ruin its perfect shape.
There is no reverence for seniority within the world of crispiness. I will always be starstruck by great chefs, but crunchy chicken skin has no way of telling if you are Alice Waters or my sister. That may seem like a coldly intellectual idea, but understanding what makes food tick should go hand-in-hand with appreciating the magic of a virtuoso chef at work. We’re all playing the same game, and figuring out the rules is the best way to learn from the pros.