The article has been amended to clarify that Raspet teamed up with Soylent and Pantone to create a special edition flavor of Technical Milk and Technical Food. .
Ari Taymor's cooking is technical, digging deep flavors out of plants you have never once bought at Whole Foods, and dishes like crisp English muffins with uni and burrata and frozen foie gras with coffee granola occasionally seem too cute, but the effects are unfussy, direct and delicious.
She would rate these according to several criteria, including quality of the products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef.
In the big picture, Nordic naturalism (with its embrace of ancient, earthy and cold-weather foods) and Spanish modernism (which celebrates intense flavors and technical skills) are surging as American chefs return from internships abroad at places like Noma, Mugaritz and Arzak.
"It's very easy to be engrossed in the technical details, but not the flavor, or vice versa.
The technical machinery specific to each flavor of model is concerned with deducing the latter from the former.
He noted that he hadn't initially been trained as a pastry chef and that Mexican cuisine was no plebeian cakewalk, writing, "I'm trying to find beauty and my own voice within a system of cooking that I think rivals any other in terms of technical complexity and pure dynamic flavors".
The deductive process that leads from assumptions to conclusions involves much the same Aristotelian syllogisms disguised in the particular technical language appropriate to the particular flavor of model being used or, more often, yet further disguised in computer-speak.
That's less a technical accomplishment than a triumph of flavors that wind up working terrifically together, and of superior cooking.
Dianne Sansone, a flavor chemist and head of technical services at Flavor and Fragrances Specialties, which is based in Mahwah, N.J., said the company first developed a pumpkin spice flavor in the early 1990s for a coffee brand, well before use of the flavor became widespread.
