The French Culinary Institute has a blog, “Cooking Issues“, which they describe as a “Tech’N Stuff Blog”.
Boy howdy, they’re right. This seems to be the blog for Ferran Adrià fans.
For example, check out this post, in which the author describes the use of rotary evaporators in the kitchen.
Because rotovaps distill gently at low temperature under vacuum, they happen to also be good at preserving flavors — much better than traditional distillation.
Note that these machines were originally designed to be used in labs, for evaporating off solvents.
Fed up, I bought an early 80’s EL131 Buchi rotary evaporator on eBay the next year (they’re cheap at auction – check it out).
- I did check it out. The cheapest one I found was $1,500, and I’m not sure that was a complete unit. I’ll admit the 20-liter one is probably overkill for kitchen use. (Edited to add: Lawrence pointed out some cheaper ones that came up using different search terms, but many of those looked incomplete or non-functional.)
- I wonder if these would be legal in Texas without a permit. My reading of the DPS site suggests that these would fall under “distilling apparatus”.
Or you could make “stretchy chewy ice cream“. That actually sounds like a fun summer project for those of you who have kids.
I got a kick out of this quote:
Because, you know, everyone has a centrifuge in their kitchen. (But they seem to be much cheaper on eBay than rotovaps.)
TJIC actually tipped me off to this when he noted their post on using liquid nitrogen in the kitchen. Short version: be careful, this stuff will kill you dead.