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HOWGRANTCREATES:

10PRINCIPLES

“Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware storę and fashion in an airport.”

-ROBERT WIEDER. JOURNALIST

Grant coraes up with novel dishes all the time. Does the spirit just move him, or is it a God-given talent?

I’m surę it’s both, but fortunately for us mortals, there are thought exercises you can borrow from Grant and use to great effect. IVe adapted the below list of 10 from the inimita-ble Aiinea cookbook. I’ve also taken liberties to help cooks lacking six-figure food budgets, so all mistakes (or bastardizations) are minę.

We’ll stretch your creathrity one principle at a time. Feel free to skip around until some-thing strikes your fancy.

THE10PRINCIPLES

•    Serviceware

•    Reversal

•    Technology

•    “Bouncing”Flavors

•    Barę Ingredients

•    Form Mhniddng

•    Texture Manipulation

•    Profile Replication

•    Themes ■ Aroma

SERVICEWARE

As Grant puts it: “The service pieces are a uniąue defining element of the Aiinea experi-ence.” Circa 2002, Grant reached out to Martin Kastner to create custom serviceware for Trio. Martin has sińce created morę than 30 pieces for Aiinea, many of which can be bought on crucialdetail.com (when not sold out);

“Serviceware” refers to all the plates, dishes, silverware, etc., that food is served on orwith. It can rangę from a piece of bark from your backyard to art suitable for MoMA.

To experiment, askyourself: “If I couldn’t use any of the plates or cups in my house, what would I serve food on? What would I serve drinks in?” Get creative. It might feel ridiculous, which is why you tell guests thatyou’re playing with odd serving pieces for fun. Give yourself permission to mess around. All work and no play makes Jack a duli boy, indeed.

REVERSAL

Imagine a cheese piąte with goat cheese, pista-chios, roasted red peppers, and fresh raspber-ries. That’s not so unusual. But howabout a dessert (last course instead of first) of rasp-berry goafs milk, red pepper taffy (peppers

of creme fraiche to give it a brittle texture, then powder salmon and pink pepper on top using a Microplane. The salmon becomes almost an aroma.

Serviceware: A snapshot from one of the bestmeals of my life, courtesy of Saison in San Francisco. Here, a piece of Kindai bluefin tunaham, smoked and aged for 28 days. That shimmering surface, beautifully suspend-ing the food in midair, is cling wrap. Simpie, cheap, and wonderful.

cooked down to a taffy-like consistency), and pistachios? We already know the flavors will work, but the presentation is entirely new.

Toexperiment, ask yourself: “What Mes can I flip? Which ingredient t ex tur e s can I swap? Is there a ‘desser f I can ser ve as a Brst course, or vice versa?” And so on.

Everyone knows that smoked salmon and sourcream go together... like PB&J or Mork andMindy.Theuniąue “anti-griddle,” cre-ated by Philip Preston at PolyScience, how-ever, allows us to reinvent this everyday duo. Ithas a surface that can be lowered to -30°F. Using it, we can freeze the bottom of a dollop

But... anti-griddles are freakin’ expensive! $1,000+ to start.

This is why we should define “technology” broadly: a tool for achieving a specific out-come. No need to break the bank, no need for buttons or LEDs. Have you seen those chimps on the Discovery Channel using sticks to fish ants out of anthills? That’s technology, baby.

Chefs get to use “roto-vaps” (rotary evaporators), volcano vaporizers, and anti-griddles to create consistency for 100 dishes a night. The home chef can improvise and still get great results. The original Aiinea menu was tested in Nick’s home kitchen. The anti-griddle didn’t exist then, so he used a bak-ing sheet (sometimes the back of a spatula) placed on dry ice. You can, too.

To experiment, ask yourself: “What tools in my house might I repurpose for food? Are there any safe off-label uses for the objects around me? What gadgets on the PolyScience website (cuisinetechnology ,com) will I buy when I win the lottery?”

“BOUNCING" FLAVQRS

For help with “bouncing” (free-associating) flavors, I strongly recommend the Belgian wonder of foodpairing.be, as well as Culinary Artistry, which Grant named his “most-used cookbook” a month after Aiinea was picked as the #1 restaurant in the U.S. by Gourmet magazine.*

Here’s how it works. First, pick an ingredient you’d like to experiment with: say, pea-nuts. Next, use the above resources to choose a peanut-friendly ingredient, like bacon. Repeat the search, now finding a bacon-friendly ingredient to add to your “recipe,” such as gin-ger. Continue this “bouncing” until you have your desired number of ingredients for the dish. Nowyou just need to make it look and taste good (and don’t forget texture).