By Homaro Cantu, Special to CNN
Editor's Note: Chef Homaro Cantu is a molecular gastronomist and owner of Chicago restaurants Moto and iNG. CNN featured Cantu in the November 27 episode of "The Next List."
For generations, we have become accustomed to guilty pleasures that please our palates. From birth we are taught to consume sweet flavors beginning with mother’s milk. Children learn quickly that candy, chocolate and Christmas cookies are things of pleasure. Why not make the paradigm shift from these unhealthy guilty pleasures to truly guilt-free goodies?
How is this possible? Take the good-old-fashioned burger. Rather than reproducing the ubiquitous veggie burger, or flavorless cardboard, why not approach it with real innovation? On my television show Future Food (on Discovery Network’s Planet Green) we actually attempted to shorten the food chain by creating a burger out of the ingredients that are found in livestock feed. Genius!
The three ingredients we used were corn, beets and barley. For that savory, char-grilled flavor, we charred the corn until it was sweet and blackened, and mixed it with cooked barley, which when blended, has an almost identical texture to a cooked burger protein. Oven-dried beet pulp provided the right texture. Beet juice added color to the veggie patties as well as an eggless mayonnaise to mimic the fat and blood in a burger. Corn oil was used for sautéing and cornstarch was used for binding. It actually looked and tasted like the real thing. No cows were harmed and we created the world’s first vegan burger made from what cows eat - instead of eating the cows themselves. It’s a start. That was 3 years ago at Moto Restaurant.
These days at our sister restaurant, iNG (Imagining New Gastronomy) we have decided to take on the 800-pound gorilla … sugar. With help from the Miracle Berry - a berry that makes bitter and sour foods taste sweet, we are able to recreate every sweet guilty pleasure imaginable. It’s not a trick and it’s not a chemical. The berry contains a glycoprotein that prevents the sour receptors on your tongue from tasting sour flavors. When you eat sour foods, they taste intensely sweet. Lemons taste like lemonade. Limes taste like ... well, the best limes you have ever tasted. Love soda? Make your own with a lemon and some soda water. No sugar. No calories. No chemicals. Our diners swear by it. In time, hopefully the soda industry will too. Instead of consuming sweet foods that are harmful to the body, we might just be able to eat what we love without the junk. Think of the possibilities with Type 2 Diabetes and obesity. Healthy junk food. Hopefully it’s our future and the next frontier in fast food.
Or at least mine.
Each week, CNN's "The Next List" profiles innovators, visionaries and agents of change. They’re not household names just yet, but they’re movers and shakers in their own worlds. We’re introducing them to you because these individuals are steadily mapping the course to the future with their new ideas.
WHO: Host Dr. Sanjay Gupta
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Sugar also contributes to the moistness of desserts and their tenderness. The flour or starch component in most desserts serves as a protein and gives the dessert structure. Different flours such as All-Purpose Flour or Pastry Flour provide a less rigid gluten network and therefore a different texture. Along with flour desserts may contain a dairy product...:
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There are sources for the berries on the internet, but if you have a green thumb check out Logee's. They sell the bush. Just remember, if it freezes in your area you will need to be able to protect it during winter weather.
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what arethenames of berries where do u get thm? iam in newyork
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I ordered my miracles berries on Think Geek and they were a trip. It was pretty awesome, drank vinegar like a dessert wine and ate lemons like oranges.
It's also expensive right now and I think there's only one or at most a handful of suppliers in the US. Still, I've been wanting to get some friends together to pool enough money to through one of those "taste tripping" parties I've heard about
But if you want calorie-free sweetness, there are a half dozen zero calorie sweeteners on the market. I prefer sweeteners made from Stevia extract, as they don't have the nasty aftertaste that I find in saccharine and aspertame (I know I probably butchered the spelling of those)
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sveatirw1 on May 27, 2010 Internal electronic features are really neet,no one else offers such features,you need to see the thing inperson,hard to find though as they sell out quite quickly