Grant Achatz’s Alinea

story by David Winchell
photo by Kendall Haupt

I picture caramel corn as coming in a huge tin around Christmastime, or maybe in a paper cone at an amusement park. But through the inter­pretive magic of Chef Grant Achatz (rhymes with “rackets”), it can come in a shot glass: warm, buttery custard, a “purée” of popcorn topped with oodles of foam, caramel blended with soy lecithin. The taste is explo­sive, like putting a whole handful of caramel corn in your mouth at once. One little cup is more than enough.

That dish is to date the only one I have prepared out of over 100 in the Alinea cookbook ($50), published last October as a companion to Achatz’s Chicago restaurant of the same name. Relative to the other rec­ipes, it is hardly challenging: most recipes call for five or (many) more separately prepared components and give elaborate plating instructions (tweezers are often involved). That the restaurant serves as many as 27 of these miniature marvels to each guest for a single meal explains both the high cost of eating there (over $200) as well as its many accolades – Gourmet named it best in the country for 2006.

Alinea is at the forefront of a style of cuisine popularly called molecular gastronomy, although Achatz prefers the term “progressive American.” It is a rigorously scientific approach to food and cook­ing that combines commercial food additives like gelling agents, emulsifiers, and other oddities with cutting-edge tech­nology and a fanatical attention to detail to achieve otherwise impossible results.

The handsome and heavy black-and-grey book serves two purposes. First, its hundreds of pictures and lovely essays by food writers Michael Ruhlman, Jeffrey Steingarten, and oth­ers provide a vivid document of the creative and technical processes at the highest levels of American cooking. On that level, it is a coffee-table discussion piece par excellence. But second, and more significantly, it offers culinary professionals and dedicated amateurs an invaluable primer on an increasingly important approach to haute cuisine.

A handy section entitled “How To Use This Book” stresses that the authors make no accommodations for home kitchens. However, it also suggests alternatives for certain pieces of equipment and suppliers for unconventional ingredients; an “antigriddle,” for example, can be approx­imated with dry ice and a sheet pan. Further support comes from the Alinea Mosaic, an online discussion board that allows readers to inter­act with Achatz and his team as well as with each other. With enough determination, even modestly skilled cooks can try methods like “spher­ification,” in which drops of intensely flavored liquid are submerged in a sodium alginate solution to form gelled spheres.

All of this makes for food that appears alien, even forbidding, at first glance; we might reasonably wonder why such bizarre prep­arations are worth celebrating. The answer, I think, is surprise: Achatz delights in playing with his guests’ expectations and pre­conceptions, whether through seemingly unusual flavor pair­ings (beef with root beer sauce, inspired by his love of burgers and floats at A&W) or studies of the many textures possible with just a single ingredient (rhubarb served seven ways, from a crispy “chip” to a creamy sorbet).

This is challenging food. Perhaps it isn’t always delicious in the manner of your grand­mother’s meatloaf, but it is never, ever boring. For those of us who have yet to make the pil­grimage to Chicago or who are simply curious, this book makes Achatz’s passion and consum­mate technical precision easily appreciable.