By William Grimes
Published: December 11, 2005
Fried mayonnaise? Hot ice cream? Chocolate pudding that can be sliced and cut? This year witnessed the flourishing of an unusual culinary fashion: dishes that, with the addition of certain chemicals, turn hot into cold or moist into dry or create an invisible boundary between the two.
When chefs talk about fresh ingredients, gellan does not normally come to mind. Then again, neither does fried mayonnaise, but you cannot have one without the other. Gellan, a gum derived from bacterially fermented carbohydrates, holds emulsions together at very high heat. Wylie Dufresne, the chef and owner of WD-50 in Manhattan, uses it to deep-fry mayonnaise, which he serves with pickled beef tongue in a kind of disassembled deli sandwich. The mayonnaise, cut into cubes and coated with flour, egg and bread crumbs before going into the deep-fryer, is brown and crisp on the outside, oozy inside.
At the restaurant Alinea in Chicago, Alex Stupak, the pastry chef, has pulled off almost as neat a trick using tapioca maltodextrin, a starch derivative that absorbs fat. By pulsing it in a food processor with caramel candy, he can transform caramel into a powder, which, when eaten, turns right back into caramel as the ingredients recombine in your mouth.
The sweetener sorbitol also has its charms. It is commonly used in toothpaste, but add enough to your concoction and it has a plasticizing effect. Stupak uses it to turn chocolate pudding into a substance that can be rolled out, sliced and cut into thin strips that retain the mouth feel of ordinary pudding but can be tied into knots. This is a tantalizing prospect for pastry chefs, who, Stupak points out, ''are always trying to get away from circles and squares.''
Dufresne, meanwhile, has moved on to methylcellulose, a polysaccharide gel that sets when hot and melts when cold. He has added it to chilled lemon yogurt in a squeeze bottle. When squirted into a bowl of hot cocoa dashi, the yogurt turns into plump ''noodles.''
At the Fat Duck, a relentlessly experimental restaurant in Bray, England, the chef and owner, Heston Blumenthal, tried using methylcellulose to create hot ice cream but failed to get beyond what he calls ''a slightly goopy mousse.'' On the other hand, he has come up with hot and cold tea served in the same cup. The two teas are separated by a seemingly liquid wall made of ''a solid broken up into little bits.'' The secret? It's a secret. William Grimes
Photo: Design your dish at the restaurant. WD-50 with a squeeze of lemon yogurt that becomes ''noodles'' in a bowl of hot cocoa dashi. Gastronomic Reversals (Photograph by Tony Cenicola)