Blood-sauced steak or offal ice cream don’t sound very appealing but, for two science-mad chefs in Wellington, it’s the kind of boundary-pushing plates they hope will join the sadly lacking line-up of "Kiwi cuisine".
In a nondescript Wellington office block, an old hotel kitchen has been turned into a lab dedicated to making food you’ve never dreamed of.
"[It's about] creating something that goes above and beyond what you normally think would be possible," said chef Shepherd Elliott, one of the men behind The Development Kitchen.
This is a place without diners and you couldn’t get a reservation if you tried. Instead, the only customers are companies and restaurants looking for a safe space to push New Zealand foods to their limits.
"The product is just so amazing. But we just sort of use it in its most basic form and we fall short because we don't understand how we can apply that product and make it work so that we can internationally put it out there," said chef Dale Bowie.
The South African-born chef has travelled the world — cooking alongside household names such as Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay before landing in Wellington where he started the Development Kitchen.
Maximising from molecular level
Bowie is now studying foods at a molecular level to maximise one thing and one thing only: Taste.
"For grass-fed Angus beef, intermuscular fat starts to melt at 46 degrees. At 54 degrees, the cell walls start to break where it starts to leech out.”
Using the perfect temperature somewhere in the middle — a fat rendering juicy state of 49 degrees — they sought an opportunity to push the flavour further. Beef blood provided a haemoglobin sauce and volatile spray.
“While we're making the sauce, we capture the steam that's coming off, which is called volatiles," said Bowie, noting that the beef blood and haemoglobin sauce "will increase the flavour by about 50 to 80 different flavours".
This process takes a great steak and lays a flavour explosion across it.
From seaweed meatballs, with as much protein as their beef or lamb counterparts, to a fish sauce replacement using parts of the cow that would usually be wasted, their brief is to add value to the amazing work our food producers are already doing.
Trying a flavour combination that turns out to be revolting is all part of the process.
Bowie puts it bluntly: “We have a saying in the development kitchen that if you're not f****** up you're not trying hard enough.”
When they do craft a winner, it’s time to take it to their sensory evaluation room. A place where light, oxygen and odour are controlled to test their weird and wild combinations on the public palate.
Lamb glands poached in cream and miso
Their offal ice cream, (lamb glands poached with cream and miso) may not sound appealing on a commercial menu but at The Development Kitchen it’s served up with little explanation but received with overwhelming positivity.
“What does offal look like in a dessert or what does it look like in a drink? Or you know, what can we do with it? How can we use this product — especially with anything that's kind of not given much value or wasted,” said Elliot.
Currently, they’re working on a healthy chocolate product with supermodel Kylie Bax and seaweed company Agrisea.
“In there, we've got collagen, gorse powder. There is some fermented seaweed juice and a little bit of mushroom powder.”
The ultimate goal is to help add value to the incredible products we already make in New Zealand.
Bowie said: “New Zealand's probably got some of the best produce in the world — it's just not understood at all.”
What that value is, even he doesn’t know yet.
“I think all the massive inventions in food have come from somebody making a big enough mistake," Bowie said.
"Something will happen in this lab that will differentiate us from anywhere else in the world.”
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