American’s Love Complex For Asian Noodle (3/3)

For the latest in nontraditional noodles, the molecular gastronomers chime in. Wylie Dufresne, executive chef of WD-50 in New York, made headlines last year for his shrimp "noodles," for which he pureed shrimp with an enzyme called transglutaminase, which binds proteins, and squeezed the mixture from a pastry bag into a water bath to form noodles. "The technique can be done with chicken or fish," Dufresne says. "With beef it's not so sexy because it turns gray when you cook it, unless you add nitrates, which we could." And lately he's having customers make their own noodles by adding a gum called methylcellulose to lemon yogurt. Unlike most gums, methylcellulose gels when it's heated rather than when it's cooled. So he brings out squeeze bottles of the yogurt and has his customers squirt it into a savory hot cocoa dashi broth, which is dashi mixed with chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs and water and then clarified. The yogurt sets into noodle shapes when it's squeezed into the broth. "It very, very much mimics the texture of a noodle," Dufresne says. http://www.nrn.com/