You Can't Eat Originality

Last night, I watched Iron Chef America for the first time in my life. My readers are always mentioning Food Network shows of which I am only dimly aware, and I had to let Marv and Maynard out for a while, so I needed something to occupy my time. And there it was.

The matchup: Bobby Flay versus Alan Perry something or other...I don't actually remember the other guy's name. It had "Perry" in it. He was bald.

I don't know much about Bobby Flay. People say he barbecues. Also, he's pretty butch for a chef. That about covers what I know.

I had always assumed that Iron Chef shows worked like this: a couple of chumps show up at the studio, the show's organizers tell them what the ingredients are, and then they cook.

This version of the show resembles my own life, after a week of avoiding grocery shopping. I stagger into the kitchen, spill coffee grounds all over the counter, finally get the machine going, and then peer into the fridge. "Three stale eggs. Half an onion. Two moldering banana peppers floating in a half-empty jar. A piece of cheese I can scrape most of the mold off of. HUEVOS RANCHEROS!"

Apparently, it doesn't work that way. These guys showed up with prepared recipes, so they must have known what they were cooking.

They had celebrity judges. That was interesting. The first was a huge guy who cooks for Oprah. He was really polite. Professional courtesy, I guess. The second was some broad who didn't like ANYTHING. I suspected her of being kind of woman whose bedroom performance consists of lying motionless and saying, "You're doing it wrong, plus you don't earn enough money." The third was a guy named Mo Rocca. I think he's a comedian, although it was not obvious from his performance. Nice name. He probably has a cousin named Libby Yuh.

I wasn't impressed with most of the stuff they made. I thought the video would be a good tool for teaching young cooks everything that's wrong with nouvelle cuisine. Ever since the Eighties, chefs have been busting their asses, trying to be creative. As a result, we go to restaurants, and we pick up menus, and we invariably see bizarre ingredient combinations that are more indicative of desperation than talent.

I don't want coconut milk and chipotle sauce on my steak. I don't want walnuts in my soup. I don't want ice cream with corn or beer in it. Not unless it WORKS, so well that you absolutely can't resist doing it. And it almost never does.

The Perry guy made giant ravioli. Then he ground up chicken livers. He put a raw egg yolk in the center of the lower half of each piece of ravioli, and then he took a piping bag and pooped a ring of liver around it. Then he sealed the ravioli and boiled it. He covered it with a sauce made from ground-up sea urchin. If you don't watch food shows, you will think I'm kidding.

What was going through his head? What do you have to smoke to come up with a combination like that?

I don't think we have sea urchin in Florida. I'll have to go to the store and ask for some. Or I could just jump in the bay and feel around on the bottom and cook whatever I find. We have a lot of sea cucumbers here; that's even more bizarre than a sea urchin. Maybe I'll fry one and decorate it with sauce made from cranberries.

The Chinese actually eat sea cucumbers. Have you seen these creatures? The sea cucumbers, not the Chinese. Everybody has seen the Chinese. A sea cucumber is a lot like a lumpy grey penis that exists independently of an owner. It's covered with snot, and when you pick it up, fluid squirts out of the end, making it the ultimate seaside tool for little boys who enjoy freaking out little girls.

The sea cucumber is home to an unfortunate organism known as the pearlfish. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, pearlfish must be former tax auditors. The pearlfish spends its entire life hanging out in a sea cucumber's anus, wherever that is. Think of it this way; if Bill Clinton is a sea cucumber, Lanny Davis and George Stephanopoulos are pearlfish.

To carry sea cucumber/Democrat analogies even farther, let me say that I have been told that a frightened sea cucumber responds to threats by vomiting out its digestive system. I guess the predator eats the guts and goes away. Does this remind you at all of worried Democrats choosing Howard Dean as their leader? There is something similar about the irrational, self-disruptive disruption of the inner workings.

To be fair, the only political leader who has vomited publicly in recent history is Bush I, and he vomited on the Japanese, not a predator. Actually, they were considered somewhat predatory at the time. This was before their currency plunged to the point where it became an inexpensive substitute for toilet paper.

Where was I?

Bobby Flay made a barbecue sauce from ketchup, cinnamon, and molasses, I think. On the one hand, I give him points for being down to earth and squeezing a bottle of Heinz in front of a bunch of tightass foodies. On the other...dude. Ketchup has its place in recipes, but couldn't you at least have started with tomato paste and worked up something original?

He fried the sauce-coated chicken in the sauce, which was a little weird, but it caramelized some of the sauce, so I suppose he had a point. I was upset to see him and the other guy using vegetable oil. That's always a mistake, if you ask me. What little flavor vegetable oil has is bad, and it doesn't make food flavors mingle the way real fat does.

He also fried some chicken in blue corn meal and put a little biscuit on the side. That was pretty good, but shouldn't we be brave enough to admit that blue corn tastes pretty much like normal corn? Is there really any point in hunting it down at the yuppie grocery? My favorite corn meal of all time is Martha White, which is even whiter than I am.

Don't ask me why, but the sight of him frying chicken in blue corn meal caused me to consider frying chicken in a mixture of flour and potato starch. I realize the connection is not obvious. I think I'll try that. But there is no way I'll fry chicken in corn meal.

Perry X or whatever his name was used a technique I had never seen before. He cooked some stuff "sous vide," or "under vacuum." He sealed a bunch of crap in a vacuum bag and simmered it. Supposedly, this forces the flavors to combine.

Frankly, it looks like total B.S. to me. Food in a vacuum bag is NOT in a vacuum. Not much of a vacuum, any way. The air is gone, but that's not a vacuum. A vacuum requires reduced atmospheric pressure. You aren't going to get that in a flexible bag that accomodates suction by collapsing. I think you could get the exact same effect by plopping your stuff in a roasting bag and tying it off.

Vacuum sealers are a huge waste of money. I got one, for saving fish. Useless. It's a respected brand--Tilia--but it barely works, and the seals can't be trusted unless you're working with dry items. Liquids migrate around and get in the way of the thing that melts the plastic together. You want to stop freezer burn? Use foil or butcher paper. No lie. Look it up on the web; tests prove it. Vacuum bags are a joke. But they're great for storing things you can't eat. For instance, if you keep a pistol on your boat, a vacuum bag will keep it nice and fresh until you want to shoot someone.

The Perry guy also fried some chicken with Manchego cheese and Serrano ham inside it. Great idea. In 1850. Chicken Kiev and the Montecristo sandwich covered the same ground eons ago.

Chef Perry did one thing I liked. He took chicken thighs and mashed the meat down to one end so the femurs stood up like little handles. Then he coated them with something or other and fried them, and then he used a syringe to shoot them full of curry sauce. But Little Miss "This Food Sucks" said they weren't that great.

I thought the show was okay, but in my opinion, a person who can make a perfect biscuit is more valuable than ten trendy goofballs who come up with new ways to combine ingredients inappropriately. What they're doing is like hard bop; it's so progressive, it fails to achieve its fundamental purpose, which is to bring pleasure.

I was talking to my piano teacher yesterday, and I was crapping on the composer John Williams, whose works all sound alike to me, and I asked him if there was a single Chopin or Liszt out there today. And he told me about some nut who composes for player pianos.

Composing for the player piano is not like composing for a normal piano, because a player piano can do anything. It can sound all 88 notes at once, if you want. A human being can only hit the notes his fingers can reach. So this guy composes stuff for several player pianos, and then he turns them all on at once.

Okay.

I said, "So there's nobody out there who still composes music simply because it's beautiful." Apparently not. You have to be progressive. If Chopin came back to life, he'd be unable to find work, no matter how beautiful and sophisticated his new compositions were. If he and Michelangelo and Shakespeare all came back to life at the same time, they'd end up busing tables and sharing a roach-infested efficiency.

That's just stupid. Art shouldn't be all brains and no feeling. And food that tastes good is more important than food that's merely creative. And improving conventional foods IS creative. If we were really ready to give up working on conventional food, it would be because the conventional food we make was so good, there was no point in continuing to fool with it. But it isn't. After hundreds of years of trying, people still make bad biscuits. That tells you we have no compelling reason to grind up sea urchins and spread them on liver ravioli.

I've often criticized Asians for clinging to old ideas too long. While we leap forward in the arts, they seem to cling to ideas that are pretty damned stale. But maybe there's an advantage to their way of thinking. When you move forward too fast, you give up the chance of unlocking the really subtle secrets of whatever it is that you're doing. So you end up with sea urchin ravioli and bad biscuits.

Or maybe the coffee just isn't strong enough this morning, and later on, I'll realize this was just crazy talk.

I feel an urge to start doing recipes again. I still want to perfect the cinnamon roll. I want to make big ones about the size of a grapefruit, dripping with honey and cinnamon, with pecans that fall and clatter on the table as you eat.

Someone stop me. I am just too damned fat to keep doing this.