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Pino Maffeo brings chemistry to the kitchen

By Joe Yonan, Globe Staff | June 22, 2005

When planning their menus, most chefs surely start by asking what's in season, what goes well with it, and how the combination might fit into the restaurant's way of presenting food. At Restaurant L, Pino Maffeo asks all that, but also wonders, what is the food's reading on an infrared spectrometer? And what would happen if he dipped it in liquid nitrogen?

With the help of a Suffolk University chemistry professor, Maffeo is spinning meat fats in a centrifuge, experimenting with gelling compounds, and analyzing foods to see how their chemical makeup might suggest taste affinities. In other words, besides his saute pans, tongs, and sheet pans, Maffeo uses test tubes, vials, and safety goggles in his basement kitchen in Louis Boston. Maffeo is certainly not the only chef who is pushing the culinary applications of science. Worldwide, the trend has been spearheaded by such so-called molecular gastronomists as chef Ferran Adria of El Bulli restaurant on the northern coast of Spain and Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck restaurant in the London suburb of Bray.

''I don't want to put myself out there as a crazy scientist, because I'm not," Maffeo says as he pushes some buttons on his Eppendorf MiniSpin and shows how it can spin vials of beef fat at up to 13,000 revolutions per minute. ''For me it's about making food taste more like food -- if that makes sense."

Take the process involved in creating a deceptively simple-looking steak. Maffeo buys high-quality beef fat, melts it, puts it into the centrifuge, and within 25 to 30 minutes, pulls out vials in which the fat has separated into two distinct layers. The one he wants is on top: a clear golden liquid, essentially clarified fat. After he grills a steak, he glazes it with this fat, and the effect is a shot of pure beef flavor.

His use of liquid nitrogen is even showier. Maffeo pulls over a styrofoam box marked ''Do Not Touch or Move -- Pino" and a large canister, and straps on goggles. He starts pouring from canister to box, and, as the nitrogen within crackles, the mist rises like something out of ''Lord of the Rings." Maffeo is essentially creating a flash-freezer.

''Step back. If this splashes up into your eyes, you could go blind. This is really, really cold. No joke," he says, then he follows with a joke: ''Head's up! Just kidding."

He blows on it so the mist will part and he can see the surface of the liquid. He scoops thickened yogurt onto a ceramic Asian spoon, then dunks it for a mere second. When it emerges, the yogurt's edges are frozen solid. With a syringe, he injects grape jelly into the yogurt, dips again, and lifts it out. ''If you keep it in there too long, you'll freeze the spoon and it will shatter," he says.

The result is a little amuse-bouche, something that goes to the table while diners wait for their orders. This is a whimsical twist on PB&J, which combines the frozen yogurt and jelly with foie gras and peanuts. A similarly playful approach will probably end up infusing the presentation of a Southeast Asian fruit salad topped with a clear sauce that Maffeo hopes will evoke the summertime smell and even the consistency of tropical suntan lotion. Once he gets the gel to work the way he wants it to, he may have the waiter squeeze it out of a lotion bottle to enhance the ''theater" of the presentation.

As scientific as all this seems, it's still cooking. ''Food is science, point blank," says the chef. ''Why does water boil at 210 degrees, why does it steam at 212? Why does bread rise? It's all science. If you cannot bottle it, but control it . . . well, not even control it, just understand exactly what's happening to the food and why, it can only make you a better cook."

Among the other chefs looking at food in a similar way are Todd Winer of Olives in Boston, who is charging egg whites with nitrogen to create a lighter version of hollandaise, and using a protein coagulator -- which can turn liquids into heat-resistant solids -- to transform corn juice into a sort of corn couscous. At Clio, chef Ken Oringer plays around with liquid nitrogen, centrifuges, and alganates, but also uses basic scientific principles in such techniques as reducing a sauce through simple evaporation, with no heat applied.

To Atlanta-based food-science specialist Shirley Corriher, author of ''CookWise," such applications are a natural extension of the scientific understanding behind cooking. ''I do think that you can use science to get some really interesting and marvelous taste sensations that are different, as long as the chef is a good chef and remembers that the first priority is that the food taste wonderful," she says.

Maffeo says he has always been interested in innovative food. Then when Angela Buffone started tending bar on Friday nights at the restaurant, ''One of my sous chefs said, did you know she's a scientist?" Maffeo says. ''I said, 'really, that Italian girl?' "

Buffone, 24, is a visiting professor of organic chemistry at Suffolk University, and at L she moved quickly from bartender to chef's consultant, helping Maffeo navigate the research, equipment, and supplies they need for their projects. Their weekly meetings sometimes involve getting current projects to work -- figuring out which gellan gum, at which concentration, will cause coconut-milk to thicken the way they want -- and sometimes they discuss the next new thing Maffeo is dreaming up. That could be an exploration as simple as which foods release endorphins in the brain, or even a plan for a Willy Wonka-style flavored food capsule.

''Here's what I was thinking," Maffeo tells her in his office. ''I know it sounds ludicrous, but I was thinking of making gel strips of vegetables, kind of like Listerine strips, that would melt on the tongue. And then we would sandwich something between them."

''I like that idea," Buffone says, ''but we'll need to find a stronger gel."

Sometimes the two talk about how to obtain supplies that are usually limited to commercial applications. When it came to the gellan gum, for instance, ''the manufacturer wanted us to buy 55 pounds, and we're using 1/2 teaspoon at a time," Buffone says. ''And they have an expiration date."

Maffeo interjects, ''You could gel the Atlantic ocean with that much gum."

Setting up deliveries of liquid nitrogen was similarly ''interesting," Maffeo says. ''The guy who drops it off says, 'What exactly are you doing with this again? And how much does it cost to eat there?' "

And sometimes the conversation gets very theoretical, as when the two answer a question about whether all taste affinities may end up being traced to chemical similarity, such as that between the fennel pollen and melons that Maffeo combined in a fruit salad. When Maffeo told Buffone of that combination, she recalled a research study about pollen being used to treat melon allergies, suggesting a connection.

The issue is complicated, made more so by Maffeo's intellectual approach. ''Each person's set of taste receptors is probably like a fingerprint -- so what you taste and what I taste may be completely different," says Maffeo. A biological difference has been shown between people who like the taste of cilantro and those who find it soapy, Buffone says, while allergies prove that what one person finds delicious another may find deadly.

There's more: What about the link between what we taste and what we remember tasting? ''If you've never had a hamburger before, how do you know if it's a good one or a bad one?" Maffeo asks.

''The answer to the question, you can see, is very layered," Buffone says. ''Pino and I will probably talk about this for a really long time."

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
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In vino veritas!