BCity Winter 2015 45

SOUS VIDE SUPREMOS

Selling the building blocks of molecular cuisineAlex Bielak, Contributing Food and Drink Editor

Photos by Alex Bielak

Would you cook with a colourless, odourless chemical called dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO)? What about sodium bi-carbonate or a substance known as NaCl? You have almost

certainly done so, using water, baking soda and salt which are the common names for the three compounds. Would you allow your kids to eat sodium alginate? Tick “yes” if they have ever had Cheez Whiz: it is but one in a long list of ingredients.

Admittedly you might not (yet) have had agar agar, calcium lac-tate gluconate, methyl cellulose, sodium citrate or calcium chloride in your larder, but it’s a fair bet that you’ve consumed one of more of them, whether as part of fast or processed foods, or during a meal at a high end restaurant that has used a molecular cooking technique to prepare their dishes.

Burlington is home to two successful companies that distribute such products. One sells by the tonne, the other is forging a new market, providing molecular gastronauts with the small quantities of such in-

gredients, and the specialised modernist equipment they need to pro-duce astonishing fare in restaurants or at home.

As Toronto-bound commuters whiz along the QEW, they might peripherally register the name Cedarlane as they approach Appleby Line. The company – with about 100 employees in Burlington, and more at their U.S. office – distributes life science products and reagents from a portfolio of more than two million items, made by more than one thousand global companies.

From humble beginnings (yes, they actually started in a garage) they came to Burlington from Milton about eight years ago, growing revenue by 400 per cent over the past decade. Company owner John Course says, “Burlington is a wonderful place to live and raise a fam-ily. The talent pool is second to none and we also have great access to the highway.”

About five years ago, Course, who says he loves to eat, saw the op-portunity to expand into the health care and food markets. A dinner

Chef John Placko (left) with Dustin Skeoch (Cedarlane Culinary) with posters from Modernist Cooking

46 BCity Winter 2015

conversation with his brother’s close friend, noted chef and molecular cuisine specialist, John Placko, helped him solidify his thinking, leading to the formation of a small, but grow-ing, culinary division.

A young employee who had been with the company for less than two years, Dustin Skeoch, was tapped to build Cedarlane Culinary. He turned immediately to Placko for advice and mentorship, acknowledging the chef, “Was paramount in getting the whole thing going.” The goal, as Placko describes it, was to focus on modern cooking and to, “Bring ingredients and equipment to the everyday consumer.”

A self-avowed, “grilled-cheese kind of a guy,” Skeoch spent his first months research-ing the field, guided by the book Modernist Cuisine (see sidebar) that Placko – who was at the tail end of his job as Director of Cu-linary Excellence at Maple Leaf Foods, and about to launch his own molecular gastron-omy-focussed business – had recommended as a reference.

Skeoch developed a selective list of equip-ment that would not be over the head of, or too expensive for, the home consumer. He said the no-brainer cornerstone of the project was the sous vide (cooking under vacuum) technique. He concluded cooking vacuum-sealed foods in a water bath at constant tem-perature was easy, convenient, healthy, helped produce amazing food, and provided such po-tential benefits to the consumer that it was, as he put it, “Never going to go away.” On behalf of Cedarlane, he secured the Canadian distribution rights to the Sous Vide Supreme,

a breadbox sized all-in-one sous vide system that would fit comfortably on a countertop. Think of it as a modern-day crockpot.

Other products followed, including Gour-

met Whips (think an im-proved soda siphon) and Placko’s Powder for Texture line of chemicals aimed at both chefs and ad-venturous home cooks. “With a sous vide, a whip, and some of John’s in-gredients, you can do half the recipes in Mod-ernist Cuisine,” says Skeoch. His favourite dish to-date is deconstructed Buffalo chicken wings, which he rattled off how to prepare like a pro (The recipe is on the Cedar-lane Culinary website).

Skeoch who says he now

cooks duck confit, “On a Tues-day just for the hell of it, and because it is pretty easy to do in the sous vide machine,” has come a long way from that grilled-cheese

guy. While Quebec and Ontario are his big-gest markets, culinary products distributed by Cedarlane are now in more than 70 retail stores across Canada including The Bay, with

more signing up every month. The market is trending upwards, and now people are calling him to stock items rather than the other way around.

His boss, John Course, told us he is pleased with how things are going, and, depending on the roll out of new products, sees the Culi-nary Division expanding in the next year or so, which can only be good news for those interested in modernist food.

There’s another significant Burlington-based company playing a major role in the distribution of more-mainstream culinary ingredients, Quadra Chemicals Ltd. Long-recognised as one of the top 50 Best Managed Companies in Canada, not to mention one of the best employers, they’ve been flying under the radar as a significant local employer since 1991. (They declined to be interviewed for this piece, because they consider they are not a household name or brand, but are, rather, a distributor only, sending out minimum orders of 1000 kilograms to processors and manu-facturers.)

About a quarter of their 240 employees are based from Burlington, with fifteen or so in-volved directly in the food side of the business that includes a, seemingly never-ending list of products. They count colourings and flavour-ings, concentrates, preservatives, dried fruits, chocolate, nutritional supplements, wellness food ingredients among their offerings, and, of course, baking soda by the palette-load.

When added to Cedarlane’s merchandise, it seems Burlington might be a not-entirely-accidental epicentre of Canada’s food indus-try, whether traditional or modern.

Powder for Texture products

Dustin Skeoch of Cedarlane Culinary with modernist culinary equipment

BCity Winter 2015 47

An amalgam of cuisine with science, the term, “Molecular and Physical Gastronomy,” was coined in the late ‘80s by a Hungarian-born, British physicist and a French Chemist. Drs. Hervé This and Ni-colas Kurti were both passionate cooks whose research involved the physical properties of food, and how they could be transformed us-ing avant-garde approaches, ingre-dients and equipment.

A decade later, after Kurti passed away, the word physical was dropped from the definition. Latterly ‘Modernist Cuisine’ has become à la mode, driven substan-tially by Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technology Offi-cer, and author of the so-titled, in-fluential multi-volume $625 tome. A trimmed-down, but still massive, ‘at home’ version is available from www.cedarlaneculinary.ca for $120.

Progressive Cuisine (another term you might hear) approaches, involving and trans-forming the very building blocks of dishes, have been adopted and pushed much fur-ther by chefs who have consistently been acclaimed as the best in the world. Spain’s Ferran Adrià, of the now shuttered El Bulli, led the way, but preferred to call his style de-constructivist. Thomas Keller of The French Laundry in California (and author of a key, early cookbook on sous vide - Under Pres-sure: Cooking Sous Vide), Heston Blumen-thal of The Fat Duck in the UK, Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago, and René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen are also regarded as pioneers who have incorporated aspects of molecular gastronomy into their menus and cookbooks, whatever term is used.

In Canada, John Placko is the go-to-guru other chefs seek advice from on molecular cuisine, while Mark Lepine at Atelier restau-

rant in Ottawa is highly acclaimed, including by Placko who calls him a, “Very, very tal-ented chef.”Lepine was crowned Canadian Culinary Champion in 2012, and dinner at his restaurant is an almost theatre-like experi-ence.

In Burlington, Matteo Paonessa of Black-tree Restaurant produces inventive dishes that Placko calls, “Amazing,” from his tiny kitch-en. Two other chefs to watch are Chef Will Edsall of the Queen’s Head Pub and Chef Mitchell Lamb of Stone House Restaurant. As evinced by the inventive food they served up at the Winter Taste of Burlington launch, they have been experimenting with modernist approaches and we can expect their menus to reflect that in the future.

You too can try some of the techniques at home. For example I made the smoothest gluten-free cheese sauce ever, using nothing more than my stovetop, a hand blender, milk, good cheese, and a half-tablespoon of so-dium citrate from Placko’s line of “Powders

for Texture” (available for $4.99 via www.powderfortexture.com, or from Cedarlane.)

I also made a good first attempt, with nothing but frozen peas, stock, a bit of fresh mint and seasoning, my hand-blender and two chemicals, at Adrià’s near-magical, spherical, liquid pea ravioli recipe. Difficult to describe adequately, the end re-sult is a bit like an egg yolk, but it’s pea soup encapsulated in a thin gel membrane. The ravioli burst on the tongue in a spurt of flavour.

For many recipes, however, you’d require some of the more accessible, but not inexpensive gadgets (e.g. sous vide circulator or machine, vacuum sealer, smoking gun, Whip – which is basically a soda siphon–,blowtorch etc.) For instance a com-pact Sous Vide Supreme, ‘Demi’

model is available at Costco.ca for $350 and will soon appear in the stores them-selves, a sure-fire indicator the technique has become mainstream.

What else is on the horizon? Much fur-ther out there, and a far harder sell, Dr. This is championing what he has called “Note by Note” cuisine. Pure molecular compounds, rather than conventional ingredients (like meat and plants), are used to create edible mixtures (dishes). He was quoted by the BBC as saying this is akin to, “A painter us-ing primary colours or a musician composing note by note.”

Beyond any culinary applications, and putting aside visions of Soylent Green, the creation of nutritious “foods” from basic chemical building blocks, such as those sold to individuals or in bulk by companies like Cedarlane and Quadra, might eventually contribute to more sustainable and energy-efficient food production.

Alex Bielak

Liquid Pea Ravioli with truffle salt Photo by Hélène Dupuis

What is molecular gastronomy, who is doing it in Burlington, and can you do it at home?

Alex Bielak is a contributing food and drink editor to B City Magazine. A passionate cook, epicure and storyteller, his engaging writing and photos have appeared in various Canadian and international media, including a regular online column in The Hamiltonian. Follow him on Twitter: @AlexBielak

Cedarlane