RGHAYATI

nextian:

So let’s talk about the Alinea Project.

For those of you who don’t accidentally stumble across interviews with the creators of food blogs while looking up the twitter account of a food truck on the SFWeekly website—I am including this humiliating introduction to make it clear that I am complicit in everything I describe here—the Alinea Project is this guy Allen Hemberger, a special effects creator who lives in the Bay Area, and his one-man quest to make everything out of the Alinea cookbook. What’s the Alinea cookbook? Well, Alinea is a molecular gastronomy restaurant in Chicago. What’s molecular gastronomy? It’s a word for the kind of place where you are served bubblegum-covered tapioca pearls in a glass tube with creme fraiche and hibiscus gel, or, to use the recipe I have open in a tab right now, white ale gel rolled up into a spiral, topped with its own foam, with a pool of almond jam and malted milk powder, crushed pink peppercorns, lavender, orange zest, and tonka beans as topping. I’m not making this up, you can see it for yourself right here. Hemberger wrote a whole post about the saga of trying to make a mozzarella balloon with tomato foam inside. (Apparently this is hard! Who knew.)

On the one hand, this is an amazing blog and I’ve spent all of today and yesterday staring at it and salivating. Alinea is definitely the kind of food that you classify as “art”, and this guy, in recreating them and innovating as he goes, is making art at home. On top of that his food photography is stunning and there’s a certain baffling, glorious beauty in the shit he goes through to make the tubes.

NOW! Let’s get into why I hate that.

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