The Chef: Dana Cree (Blackbird)The Challenger: Thomas Raquel (Acadia)The Ingredient: Pine sap
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Rodrick Markus, however, has been selling pine sap to chefs for three years through his company, Rare Tea Cellar, which specializes in rare and gourmet ingredients. He says he became interested in it after smelling the pine trees in the Oregon woods where his foragers were hunting for matsutake mushrooms. Markus asked them to start collecting the “small gobs of sap” they found on the trees. Dana Cree, pastry chef at Blackbird, who was challenged by Thomas Raquel (Acadia) to make a dish with pine sap, wasn’t sure what to expect from it. “When I first heard ‘pine sap,’ I was like, oh, OK, like mastic. So I expected to get nice, clean little beads of pitch-flavored resin. And what I got instead was something that looked like somebody went out and scraped off a woodpile,” she said. “It looks like a tree took a poop.”
“I thought it would dissolve, but it’s not water soluble,” she said. “So it ended up just melting into this tiny ball in the bottom of the pot, which I strained out, and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to wash out of my strainer.” What it left behind was “a very fragrant pine-flavored dairy,” Cree said. “It tastes exactly like a fresh-cut Christmas tree.”
Who’s next:
Place sucrose, gellan gum, guar gum, and sucrose in a small bowl. Mix until the gums are evenly dispersed in the sucrose. Add the sucrose to the pine milk, and use a hand blender to incorporate evenly.
Bring cider to a boil. Mix pectin, cornstarch, and 25 g sucrose and whisk into the cider. When the mixture has come to a boil, add the glucose and remaining sucrose. Whisking to avoid scorching, cook the confection to 108 degrees C.
