The Future of Restaurants: The Kitchen Tech Transforming the Way We Eat
Here are some of the tools changing the way chefs cook — and the food restaurants are serving.
Kitchen technology has come a long way, especially thanks to chefs like Ferran Adria and David Chang, whose test kitchens and food labs are on the forefront of the marriage between science and cooking. Tech-savvy chefs have also helped usher in an era of increased experimentation in restaurant kitchens, one that’s been facilitated by amazing, cutting-edge cooking tools.
Here are a few of the gadgets chefs are using to cook food faster, more precisely, and with more control over temperature and flavor:
When liquid nitrogen is sprayed on food, the food freezes instantly.
Liquid Nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen has made the transition from novelty cooking tool — used primarily by pioneers of modern innovative gastronomy like Ferran Adria and Wylie Dufresne, or by food network stars looking to wow the cameras — to an essential item in many mainstream restaurant kitchens. There’s a good reason for this newfound popularity: dry ice, formerly the coldest substance most chefs could get their hands on, maxes out at 42.8 degrees Celsius, while liquid nitrogen boils at -196 degrees C. Thus, when liquid nitrogen is sprayed on food, the food freezes instantly. That means ingredients that often don’t freeze well — like alcohol, fats and oil — turn solid the second they’re sprayed.
Dufresne told Popular Mechanics that liquid nitrogen often gives him more creativity than ingredients allow him on their own. “You can take a stick of butter, freeze it, whack it a few times, put the pieces on a plate and let it defrost, and you’ll have this really amazing, beautiful, geometric stuff. But when you go to touch it, it’ll be as soft as butter.”
Be careful around liquid nitrogen, though: one amateur German chef accidentally blew off both his hands while experimenting with the element.
Sous video has become a widely used technique not only in restaurants, but in home kitchens, too.
Sous Vide
Popularized in part by Per Se and French Laundry Chef Thomas Keller, who wrote the influential sous video book Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide, sous vide has become a widely used technique not only in restaurants, but in home kitchens, too. (“There really isn’t a chef now that isn’t experimenting with sous vide in the kitchen,” Thomas Keller told Saveur Magazine in 2008.) Despite the haughty-sounding French name, sous vide is a relatively simple technique. It involves cooking food in a sealed plastic bag and immersing it in temperature-controlled hot water for a long period of time. This gives the chef a very high level of control over the cooking. Meat, fish, poultry and eggs cook especially well sous vide.
Pressure Cooker
Okay, so the pressure cooker isn’t as new or as technologically advanced as the sous vide or liquid nitrogen. In fact, the pressure cooker was developed in the 1600s, though it’s come a long way since then. But pressure cookers are a stalwart of many a restaurant and home kitchen for a reason: they cook and tenderize food quickly, and the food browns and caramelizes in a richer, more intricate way than regular steaming. Don’t let anyone convince you that top restaurants don’t use pressure cookers: they’re more ubiquitous in kitchens than you think. Even three-star Michelin Chef Heston Blumenthal, a chef at the forefront of innovative cooking, wrote a 2004 piece in The Guardian extolling the many virtues of the pressure cooker.
“[The pressure cooker] is not exactly cutting edge,” Blumenthal wrote. “But it makes stock better and quicker than any other method I know of.”
