As in past years, the zoo will hold "Ice Chefs," its version of television's "Iron Chef".
It has two ice chefs on staff (making flavored ices, carving spheres).
They are installing the S-curved counter adjacent to Next that will house a high-concept bar called Aviary, with five separate stations for "cocktail chefs"; huge curved girders that evoke Victorian train stations; and a sprawling basement kitchen that will include a dedicated work space for Aviary's two full-time ice chefs.
Gus, Ida and Lily, the polar bears at the Central Park Zoo, will determine the outcome of "Ice Chefs," which will pit the professional chefs Bruce Barns (tomorrow) and Mike Powers (Sunday) against two zookeepers in a competition to concoct the most delicious bear treat.
She was served tilapia on a block of ice by the chef Rachael Ray; she was chronicled in newspaper articles, once as "Frolicsome Ida;" and then, of course, she faced the constant crush of gawking onlookers.
In her new book, No-Churn Ice Cream, pastry chef Leslie Bilderback shifts this brilliant method to make it even simpler.
When I first became a pastry chef, ice-creams and sorbets were my favourite things to make, because they capture the season probably better than anything else.
She had the eggs going at a furious boil in the stockpot, and the bread in the toaster; she had jars of mayonnaise and mustard and sweet-pickle relish out on the counter, celery and carrot and onion on the cutting board, and she had the ice-blue German chef's knife in her hand, the one that Pop had given her for Christmas.
In one corner white-coated lab technicians study the viscosity of a liquid chocolate that will efficiently run through mass-production pipes and then instantly freeze around ice cream; elsewhere chefs might help create the "sabayon of dark Venezuelan chocolate" found at the Pierre Marcolini boutique (see box, below).
