When You Introduce Sous-Vide Cooking to Sephardic Food, Are You Taking Molecular Gastronomy Too Far?

I recently attended a demonstration at culinary school on sous-vide cooking, or cooking food "under pressure." I try to go to as many demonstrations as possible because I often learn odd tidbits of culinary information, perfectly suitable for cocktail conversation. For example, ye olde pubs used to heat up alcoholic beverages with an iron poker -- a "loggerhead" -- but sometimes the man in charge of the loggerhead would become drunk on glug and a bit sloppy, suddenly you'd have a poker up the tunic, and all hell would break loose. Hence the term being "at loggerheads" with someone. In addition, at the end of each demonstration, the attendees are encouraged to eat food so as to fully absorb the content of each lesson. (If only my philosophy lectures were like this at college: "Class, did you know that Hegel insisted his wife spread a paste of cardamom and tamarind over her left breast to entice him into bed each night? Now, put those books down, come up here, and let's destroy this pizza!")

This demonstration focused on how cooking various food stuffs under pressure can change their taste. The chef cooked a handful of cloves sous-vide, and stirred them into a creamy risotto. Moments later, I found myself scooping mouthfuls of delectable risotto into my mouth, eating four or five cloves with each bite. The favor was subtle and delicate. Then we received garlic mashed potatoes with a garnish of tiny apple cubes infused with parsley. The apples, placed in the pressure cooker, had been sucked of their water, and the water replaced with verdant parsley oil. The result? Crunchy, delectable bits of parsley heaven. And, seriously, who even likes parsley?

I was so enraptured with sous-vide that I nearly gasped when presented with the next pressure-cooked item: a hard-boiled brown egg. Yech. A thick green rim encircled the yolk, a no-no at culinary school. This sight brought me down from my epicurean reverie long enough to tune into the lecture.

"These eggs are a quick-fire version of eggs that Jews make overnight before Shabbat," the Chef was saying. "They stick them in the oven all night long so that even though they can't cook on Saturday, they can still have a hot meal. It only took us one hour in the pressure cooker to make them!" he added, gleefully.

I looked down at the brown, unappealing egg on my plate. At the Passover table, eggs represent continuity, mourning, rebirth, the cycle of life. The symbolic food of my ancestors, cooked sous-vide, seemed, somehow, wrong. I took a bite.

Was that... popcorn? Unbelievable. Sous-vide cooking can make the white of a hardboiled egg taste like popcorn! Imagine how much protein, and how little fat, our little ones could ingest at the movies if marketed correctly! Just as I was about to vow to splurge on a pressure cooker and make every possible meal in it (imagine what would happen if I pressure cooked a bagel with cream cheese and lox!) all of a sudden, my tongue was no longer throwing a party for my mouth. ALERT! screamed my taste buds. THIS IS DISGUSTING! YOU ARE EATING METAL! SPIT THIS OUT. It felt like I was sucking on a quarter. The aluminum of the pressure cooker must have imparted this god awful taste onto these precious, symbolic relics of my past.

Determined to defend the honor of my race, I rushed to the library. Slow-cooked eggs, huevos haminados, originated with the Sephardic Jews, who have cooked eggs in this manner for centuries. They submerge whole eggs in water with a little bit of vegetable oil and, on occasion, dry onion peels (which helps to impart a rich brown color to the egg shells), then bring the eggs to a boil, and reduce the water to a simmer for the entire night. Eight or ten hours later, hot boiled eggs are ready for a hearty and law-abiding breakfast.

Ever skeptical of my tiny kitchen and its stove, with burners that go out when a mouse sneezes, I called my mother (I wasn't going to risk unknowingly inhaling gas during the night, not for boiled eggs) and asked her to boil some eggs in a pot and then transfer them into a crock pot for 8 hours. Thrilled to use the crock pot for the first time since I went to college (during high school she'd greet me each morning with a bowl of hot, crock-potted oatmeal, the taste and consistency of fresh grout, which she insisted I eat before leaving), she happily complied.

At my first bite of these slow-cooked eggs, I knew my egg-popcorn substitution could work. These babies had a creamy texture and the faint, amazing, popcorn taste that had so surprised me. Not even a smidge of metallic taste. They were a triumph.

Hence my plea with the molecular wizards of the culinary world: don't mess with the cooking methods of those who invented gefilte fish, ok? If not for its gastronomic merits, do it for your own safety. You don't want to experience the wrath of a whole army of Jewish mothers.