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Welcome to Heck's Labs
Some of our experimentation has led us down the path of Molecular Gastronomy.
While very new to the subject, we've been using some of the techniques for
years. This page will eventually be a place where we talk about successes and
failures, and more recipes, of course.
You might have seen some of the wonders of Molecular Gastronomy on Season 2
of Top Chef on Food TV. Marcel used some very interesting techniques that
sparked interest in the subject.
Click here for the latest experiments.
Equipment
We're taking on a bit of the tradition of Chef Randy's grampa, who was a wine
maker and apparently did some work with potato fermentation, but we can't prove
it. Much of the equipment actually comes from him and dates back more than
seventy years.
- Immersion blender (stainless hand blender)
- Separatory Funnel (I have a source, but they're out of stock)
- Immersion circulator (I so wish, but far too expensive right now)
- Adjustable grinder (my poppy seed grinders works perfectly)
- Digital thermometers
- Vacuum sealer
- Beaker stands and rings
- Flasks
- Graduated cylinders
- Burettes
- Eye droppers
- Pipettes
- Syringes
Supplies
To experiment, you've got to have supplies. Here's some stuff we've been
accumulating or are looking for:
- Sous-vide bags (we're faking these with standard freezer vacuum bags)
- Liquid lecithin (from the bulk barn)
- Xanthan gum (from the local high-end chain)
- Guar gum (from the local high-end chain)
- Agar (from our local Chinese market)
- Arrowroot starch (a favourite of mine for decades)
- Sodium alginate - yes, I want to try it.
Wish us luck!
- August 16th, 2007
- Something bad happened today. I was experimenting with Xanthan gum. Mixing
1/3 cup of strained pink grapefruit juice, 1/2 cup of sugar into a simple syrup,
then adding 1/2 teaspoon of Xanthan gum in a tablespoon of cold water, mixing
and chilling, resulted in badness. My kids called it pink snot and slime. It
tasted pretty good, even Kris, who swore she'd never have grapefruit, liked the
taste, but the texture was completely horrid. Good luck!
- August 12th, 2007 - Tomato Separation
Experiment - Results
- It took a few days, but here are the results of my first flavour separation
experiment. My thanks to Herve This for inspiring me to actually do this.
- After reducing the water side by half, the most amazing aroma of the
caramelized sugars came out. The water has a definite quality of umami as well
as, get this, something I'm actually reacting to. Because tomatoes and chillies
are related, this result is very promising. It means I actually have a shot at
isolating the allergen.
- Better than the water side, the oil developed the most incredible
floral quality after 30 minutes of heating. This has definite potential for
future recipe development.
Long live the good old Roma tomato, with all it's complexity.
- August 10th, 2007
 My new toys
arrived today! During the week I unpacked my grampa's old chemistry equipment.
Now, the separatory funnel showed up. Cool huh? The picture on the right is my
first attempt at using it. The tomatoes were chopped and boiled in water and
oil, then whizzed with an immersion blender while still hot, into a tomato
sauce. I then poured the sauce into the funnel and let it stand. The picture
shows what happened after about 30 minutes. All of the colour is in the oil, and
most of the scent and flavour. After the liquids separated, I filtered them
through standard filter paper, on the left of the stand.
You should be able to see a bit of slightly cloudy liquid in the test tube
on the left side of the stand. That's from the water portion. The yellow colour
is in suspended particles, but was not imparted to the water. No colour gets
dissolved into the water portion.
The oil has a lot of orange colour dissolved into it. So, Mom, if you're
reading this, the lesson is to stop skimming your tomato sauce.
More to come when I start working with the component parts.
- August 8th, 2007
 Here's my grampa's
old chemistry equipment, at least what I managed to salvage before their place
was sold. I wish I had managed to get my hands on an ultra-centrifuge, that I
know he probably had, but hid from us when we were kids.- August 4th, 2007
- You would not believe what happened this morning. I tried an experiment with
foaming milk in a French filtre press coffee maker -
pretty standard stuff. But, adding cocoa and a little sugar, foaming, then
cooking in the microwave, and voila! Stable chocolate cappuccino foam. The
combination of the lecithin in the cocoa and cooked proteins in the milk gave
the foam a really nice airiness and texture. People were raving about it. If you
use it, just remember me, ok? Thanks go out to Harold McGee for the suggestion
of cooking the foamed milk.
- July 15th, 2007
- You might not believe what happened to the grape cream. It did a partial
separation into two foams. Both were set from the gelatine. The top was a frothy
grape cream that picked up the sweetness of the grapes and cream - no sugar was
added in the preparation. The bottom picked up the tannins and complexity of the
grapes but had little of the cream. The flavours separated very distinctly. This
has some nice potential and I'm very pleased. This was definitely a cool
Hecksperiment!
- July 14th, 2007
- Tonight was a major success. I found a supply of reasonably pure liquid
lecithin at a local bulk barn. It's got about 1/20th the nuttiness of the
granulated soy lecithin and, if you let it stand an hour, even that disappears.
Blueberry foam! I also had fun with a grape cream. Double cooked scallops
(lime/acid cooking then pan searing) worked amazingly too. I'm also armed with
syringes for my next meat meal. What Kris doesn't know is that there's going to
be truffle au jus injected while the meat is resting. Does it sound like I'm
having fun?
- July 13th, 2007
- I took the the day off of experimenting to have one of my wisdom teeth out.
While getting a prescription filled, I found out that the pharmacy has a supply
of pure lecithin that may be pure. I can't wait to get it on Monday and play
from there.
- Late update: the supplier is back-ordered, probably from all of us MG
chefs who are cleaning out their stock. I have the order in, but will have to be
patient.
- July 10th, 2007
- Some of you may know that I cracked a wisdom tooth over the weekend. It
hasn't been fun and definitely limited my experiments (and eating). So I went
back to foams again, and had great success with a quick (1 hour) gelatine-based
strawberry foam. I wouldn't recommend it for next day, because I went a bit
heavy on the gelatine to make it work quickly. I'll probably post this one soon.
The chemistry equipment is at the bottom of the stairs waiting for me to unpack
it.
- July 8th,
2007
- We had an interesting time, with the taste test. I ground up some coriander
seed and sprinkled it over pineapple on one slice, and on the other, ground up
the same amount of black pepper. A total of 1/4 teaspoon of each was used per
each slice. The results: Rhys, who didn't like pineapple before, preferred the
coriander. Joseph preferred the black pepper. I'm undecided which I like more,
but the prediction of compatible flavours definitely panned out. I'm now working
on combining the two in lower quantities and trying to get some subtlety out of
it.
- July 5th,
2007
- I'm waiting on confirmation from the restaurant we ate at on their detection
of the interesting taste from soy lecithin. That will definite go in the
failures page if confirmed.
- Prediction: A sound theory must be predictive. In that vein, I'm
going to try a little experiment when the kids are over. Coriander has similar
warming properties to black pepper. It stands to reason that some of the flavour
characteristics imparted by the black pepper to grilled pineapple should also be
imparted by coriander. If it works, it'll be interesting.
- June 30th,
2007
- The first attempt at mango foam led to a very strange result. I started with
granules of soy lecithin and tried grinding. The poppy seed grinder gave me an
extruded tube. Very interesting, but not useful for this experiment. A coffee
grinder produced a nice powder. I then boiled down some mango in water and sugar
to get a syrup. After about 30 minutes of simmering, I added a half tablespoon
of the lecithin and buzzed it with my immersion blender. It foamed wonderfully.
However - and this is a big problem - there was a strange scent associated with
the lecithin. We use chicken feed in the cats' litter box. As it turns out,
there's a very similar scent comparing the soy lecithin and chicken feed. I
couldn't help thinking that I had made foam out of the business end of a cat.
Oh, it tasted good, but psychologically, I have got to find a different supply
of lecithin now. I blamed myself, of course. But at a recent restaurant outing,
I experienced the same scent in foam there.
- After two days being exposed to air, the bag of lecithin has also taken on
the same lovely aroma. Yuck.
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