The Chef: Brandon Baltzley (Crux)The Challenger: Bryce Caron (Blackbird/Avec)The Ingredient: Flour
One of Baltzley’s first challenges was determining what constitutes flour. While he never uses all-purpose flour, he does use starches and hydrocolloids in his cooking. The general consensus among the friends he polled, he said, was that anything that’s milled counts.
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Baltzley also made a variation on the Turkish ice cream salep dondurma, substituting kudzu starch for the traditional thickener of orchid root flour and adding Darjeeling tea for flavor and xanthan gum for more elasticity. “It’s got the weirdest mouthfeel in the world,” he said of the stretchy ice cream. “It’s like a cold Airhead.”
Cocoa nib consomme—roasted cocoa nibs cooked in water, salt, and simple syrup and then strained out—appeared in both liquid and solid form. To make the solid, Baltzley added tapioca starch, then poured it onto a tray to dehydrate. Normally he’d do it overnight, he said, but since he’d only started it that morning it wasn’t working as well as he’d have liked. After chipping away a few small pieces he had his friend and accomplice in the project, Steve Newman, a cook at North Pond, put the tray outside to dry out more.
Baltzley plated everything except the cocoa nib chicharron, which he deemed too ugly to go on the plate—though he said it “fucking tastes delicious. Like Cocoa Pebbles.”
Video by Michael Gebert/Sky Full of Bacon
710 ml heavy cream 237 ml buttermilk 250 g sugar
