Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way.
Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro.
BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto
opened in 2004, people didn't really know
what to expect. A lot of people thought
that it was a Japanese restaurant, and
maybe it was the name, maybe it was
the logo, which was like a Japanese
character, but anyway, we had all these
requests for Japanese food, which is
really not what we did. And after about
the ten thousandth request for a maki roll,
we decided to give the people
what they wanted. So this picture is
an example of printed food, and this was
the first foray into what we like to call
flavor transformation. So this is all
the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know,
a standard maki roll, printed onto
a little piece of paper.
HC: So our diners started to get bored
with this idea, and we decided to give them
the same course twice, so here we actually
took an element from the maki roll and
and took a picture of a dish and then
basically served that picture with the dish.
So this dish in particular is basically
champagne with seafood.
The champagne grapes that you see are
actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of
seafood and some crème fraiche and the
picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter)
BR: But it's not all just edible pictures.
We decided to do something
a little bit different and transform flavors
that were very familiar -- so in this case,
we have carrot cake.
So we take a carrot cake, put it
in a blender, and we have kind of like
a carrot cake juice, and then that went into
a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create
this hollow shell of carrot cake
ice cream, I guess, and it comes off
looking like, you know,
Jupiter's floating around your plate.
So yeah, we're transforming things into
something that you have absolutely
no reference for.
HC: And here's something we have no
reference to eat. This is a cigar, and
basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of
a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these
spices that go into the pork shoulder,
we fashion that into ash. We take
the sandwich and wrap it up in
a collard green, put an edible label
that bears no similarity to
a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it
in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge
you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter)
HC: Delicious.
BR: That's not it, though.
Instead of making foods that
look like things that you wouldn't eat,
we decided to make ingredients
look like dishes that you know.
So this is a plate of nachos.
The difference between our nachos
and the other guy's nachos,
is that this is actually a dessert.
So the chips are candied,
the ground beef is made from chocolate,
and the cheese is made from a shredded
mango sorbet that gets shredded
into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese.
And after doing all of this
dematerialization and reconfiguring
of this, of these ingredients, we realized
that it was pretty cool,
because as we served it, we learned that
the dish actually behaves like the real thing,
where the cheese begins to melt.
So when you're looking at this thing
in the dining room, you have this sensation
that this is actually a plate of nachos,
and it's not really until you begin tasting it
that you realize this is a dessert, and
it's just kind of like a mind-ripper.
(Laughter)
HC: So we had been creating
all of these dishes out of a
kitchen that was more like
a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and
the next logical step for us was to install
a state-of-the-art laboratory,
and that's what we have here.
So we put this in the basement, and we
got really serious about food, like
serious experimentation.
BR: One of the really cool things about
the lab, besides that we have a new
science lab in the kitchen, is that,
you know, with this new equipment, and
this new approach, all these
different doors to creativity that we never
knew were there began to open, and so the
experiments and the food and the dishes
that we created, they just kept going
further and further out there.
HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation,
and let's actually make some cool stuff.
You see a cow with its tongue hanging out.
What I see is a cow about to eat something
delicious. What is that cow eating?
And why is it delicious?
So the cow, basically, eats three basic
things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley,
and so what I do is I actually
challenge my staff with these crazy,
wild ideas. Can we take what the cow
eats, remove the cow, and then make
some hamburgers out of that?
And basically the reaction tends to be
kind of like this. (Laughter)
BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine,
Chris Jones. This is not the only guy
that just flips out when we assign
a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas,
they're hard to understand.
They're hard to just get automatically.
There's a lot of research and a lot of
failure, trial and error -- I guess, more error --
that goes into each and every dish,
so we don't always get it right, and it takes
a while for us to be able to explain that
to people.
HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I
staring at each other, we came up with
something that was pretty close
to the hamburger patty, and as you can
see it basically forms like hamburger meat.
This is made from three ingredients:
beets, barley, corn, and so it
actually cooks up like hamburger meat,
looks and tastes like hamburger meat,
and not only that, but it's basically
removing the cow from the equation.
So replicating food, taking it into that
next level is where we're going.
(Applause)
BR: And it's definitely the world's first
bleeding veggie burger,
which is a cool side effect.
And a miracle berry, if you're not familiar
with it, is a natural ingredient, and it
contains a special property.
It's a glycoprotein called miraculin,
a naturally occurring thing. It still freaks
me out every time I eat it, but it has a
unique ability to mask certain taste
receptors on your tongue, so that primarily
sour taste receptors, so normally things
that would taste very sour or tart,
somehow begin to taste very sweet.
HC: You're about to eat a lemon,
and now it tastes like lemonade.
Let's just stop and think about the
economic benefits of something like that.
We could eliminate sugar across the board
for all confectionary products and sodas,
and we can replace it with
all-natural fresh fruit.
BR: So you see us here cutting up
some watermelon. The idea with this
is that we're going to eliminate tons of
food miles, wasted energy,
and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna,
or any exotic produce or item
from a very far-away place,
with local, organic produce;
so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin.
HC: So if miracle berries take sour things
and turn them into sweet things,
we have this other pixie dust
that we put on the watermelon, and it
makes it go from sweet to savory.
So after we do that, we put it into
a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed,
some spices, and we roll it, and this
starts taking on the appearance of tuna.
So the key now is to make it
behave like tuna.
BR: And then after a quick dip into some
liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear,
we really have something that looks,
tastes and behaves like the real thing.
HC: So the key thing to remember here is,
we don't really care
what this tuna really is.
As long as it's good for you and good for
the environment, it doesn't matter.
But where is this going?
How can we take this idea of tricking your
tastebuds and leapfrog it into something
that we can do today that could be
a disruptive food technology?
So here's the next challenge.
I told the staff, let's just take a bunch
of wild plants, think of them as
food ingredients. As long as they're
non-poisonous to the human body,
go out around Chicago sidewalks,
take it, blend it, cook it and then
have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto.
Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this
and see what they think. (Laughter)
BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task
like this -- this is another one of those
assignments that the kitchen staff
hated us for. But we really had to almost
relearn how to cook in general,
because these are ingredients, you know,
plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with,
and two, we have no reference for how
to cook these things because
people don't eat them.
So we really had to think about new, creative ways
to flavor, new ways to cook
and to change texture -- and that was
the main issue with this challenge.
HC: So this is where we step into the future
and we leapfrog ahead.
So developing nations
and first-world nations,
imagine if you could take these wild plants
and consume them, food miles would
basically turn into food feet.
This disruptive mentality of what food is
would essentially open up the encyclopedia
of what raw ingredients are, even if we just
swapped out, say, one of these for flour,
that would eliminate so much energy
and so much waste.
And to give you a simple example here as to
what we actually fed these customers,
there's a bale of hay there
and some crab apples.
And basically we took hay and crab apples
and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients.
People swore they were eating
barbecue sauce, and this is free food.
BR: Thanks, guys.
(Applause)