 Thank you guys It's an honor to be here a Renee and the team of Noma and everyone that set this up. It's unbelievable And yes, I just started cooking ramen and if you asked me seven years ago, I'd be following Harold McGee in Denmark That would be insane but Unfortunate for you guys. I'm talking about microbiology and we know so little about it. I'm the person that's going to tell you about it And it's so important to food and we've been working a lot about Learning I've been learning a lot about it I know a lot of cooks out here probably didn't do so well in the sciences or probably didn't go to college or Drop that a high school all together. I completely cheated my way through. I don't know. I knew nothing until very recently And then it hit me just how important the concept and the world of microbiology is It's actually consumed all I think about now In terms of food and it's very exciting and it's exciting to know that there's other chefs out there since we've been here We're talking to Magnus talking to and the knee talking to Just everyone in general. It's great to have this sort of camaraderie where you can talk about microbiology in food and not feel like a complete weirdo because It's just something you don't register with food. I mean people think about microbiology and Alcohol fermentation they think about it in Breadmaking but that's the extent of it and then you hear these crazy things like foodborne pathogens and it becomes rather rather scary so the way we stumbled upon it was Like most things we do total accident What you see behind me is a picture of what we were trying to go for and that's a that's a a mold called asperilus or zi Orza a and But we were really trying to go after this thing called pisha, which is a completely different Genre altogether while we were trying to make katsu a bushi Katsu bushi is a Fermented steamed petrified product that you might know that's very essential in Japanese cuisine to make dashi We wanted to make our own version of dashi But with pork just because we had pork tenderloins around and I hate pork tenderloins and it's like why can't we do something that looked like it it had that Sort of similar characteristics to bonito and we we steamed it we smoked it we dehydrated it and I thought that I had I don't know what I was thinking But I just out of maybe out of sheer laziness. I just put it in a bed of rice and I let it rot for like six months and What we found was And what we're gonna I think what was probably most important Though what we're gonna talk about is I Can only just find it as microbial tewar we talk about tewar in terms of vegetables and times of soil, but It was something that was a revelation where Wherever you are in this world wherever you cook and whatever you do cook There's a time and a place as a season. There's a time when you pick the fruit when it's ripe There's a time when you pickle it. There's a time when you cure your ham All of it has to do with so many variables that it's it's it's almost infinite And that is the world of microbiology We don't realize it But these things that are omnipresent that you can't see without the help of a powerful microscope This is what make constitutes so much of our cuisine so much of Fermentation and what not that You know food would taste very bland without it so The picture behind me is a traditional katsu bushi and that's made with The koji mold asperilus Sore or say it's also known as koji Want to toss that around This is It's you can eat it. It's like a dried yeast It's not active, but it has some flavor it's just rice and it's been inoculated with the asperilus aspergillus Mold I'd rather just say koji because these Latin terms are really hard but It has a lot of flavor and it's interesting because it's the central ingredient to making the flavors of soy sauce miso You name it it's so important and When we made our our pork bushi, that's what we were trying to go after is trying to Isolate the monoculture of asperilus or see what happened was we found Pisha and we wouldn't have had any help. I mean we wouldn't we would have didn't totally screwed had we not sent it to some lovely friendly microbiologists at Harvard Rachel Dutton Ben Wolf who've We need them more than they need us and We just sent it to them to see if it was edible and safe And they came back and they were dumbfounded just as we were dumbfounded because it actually worked The pork bushi that we made Transformed and had the exact same Characteristics as that as the tuna but using completely different Molds I can't give you a comparison because it just We did everything wrong yet. It turned out to be right and then it dawned on us that the aspirin aspergillus mold is located and Originated specifically in Asia, Japan, China, Korea We were in New York City using New York ingredients New York air. So God knows what the hell was going on Because no one can figure out what Pisha is. It's completely different family than the aspergillus family. So that that really Changed the how we looked at everything all together we wanted to make koji, but we wound up with something else and That sort of led us to think about food in general your everybody ferments things and Everybody makes food. It made us question so many things and Even now it's hard so difficult for me to explain. I don't have seen it's ineffable, but It's like a scratch you can't itch in your brain because we can't realize just how large it was for us Because we started to think about if this is the flavor ingredient that that So many people are using You saw it at favacan with Magnus who on his own is messing around with microbiology making Beans the Noma guys are making a very very close Almost facsimile of miso shiro miso with yellow split peas, but the starter is all aspergillus or zea So that all leads back to Japan. So you have to question now the terroir the microbiology microbiological terroir where is that all of it coming from and This is actually the aspergillus that we time-lapse and that You cook it and you inoculate it and it grows in two days And it develops all this flavor. So if you eat that rice It's a little bit sweet. It has all a little bit fruity, but It led us to Again thinking about how we make pork bushy, but more importantly, how the hell do we understand microbiology and I Was sort of forced to learn I think we all are this is Dan Felger by the way who works at the lab with us at Momofuku and It was a very humbling experience to Re-learn what a cell is what an enzyme is all these terms that I thought I never had to care about I just spent the past ten years learning xanthym gum and hydrocolloid this and a gel of that I Didn't think that I'd have to learn more and then I realized that's my goal as a chef is we have to learn more that is our job and This is the mole that we were trying to go for Pechia, which again doesn't look like much. It's they're very simple organisms, but They have a lot of power and they control so much of the flavor that we eat So we talk about Where something grows and how it's taste all this stuff. I don't think we realize again how important these microorganisms make our food taste and and just to give you an example of a That's a Rachel Dutton teaching me about cell breakdown and how that turns into enzymes and such to the left is a photo of our Pechia induced Pork bushy we just buried it in rice and with their help. We were able to isolate that mold but You know this really led us to questioning culinary dogma just as Harold McGee was Instrumental and and people like for on everyone was fundamental in the past 20 30 years and questioning Time tested Methods of cooking, you know searing a steak doesn't seal in the juices stuff like that and there's a lot of cooks out there And I kept on thinking You know, how was this practical in a kitchen? How can I tell my cooks at the restaurant that this is important because cooks? I think almost are allergic to to learning Latin to learning anything scientific necessarily, but This seemed to work pretty well because every chef I ever worked for I had to make sauerkraut And I I would always ask well, how does it work? Well, just chopped the cabbage, you know Chiffonade, whatever the variables are there put salt cover it make a weight on it and put it in a Put it in a hot corner, and if the health department comes it's your responsibility to hide it Every time every time then I never question it and if you ask or like oh it just ferments Well, okay What what is that? What is actually happening though? That's not a that's not enough to tell a young cook that's in the kitchen. Hey Just do this recipe and it's gonna ferment. It's not enough. So we have a little bit of a chart back here, but Here's what's interesting, and hopefully it ties into what I was talking about the to our of microbes You can make sauerkraut. We actually would wish I had every chef here bring sauerkraut and sent them an email because We if we all had the same cabbage From all over the world and made sauerkraut the exact same ingredient I guarantee you each one would taste different. The reason is what makes the fermentation process happen isn't Anything else other than just our credit is what cabbage salt? That's pretty much it weighted in an anaerobic environment you have this bacteria that kills me to pronounce lactobacillus and There's a varieties of it, but It's inherent in the cabbage It's not attracting anything. It's already in the cabbage as it grows That was that again blew my mind. I couldn't fathom the concept. I just thought that you know it fermented like magic It just just happened, but no what happens is You had so much salt that It doesn't let any other bacteria fungi anything else Reproduce or live it, but it's a very very good environment for the these two guys the brevis and the planetarium to eat the starch and to create lactic acid and You know, I've been pickling things. I make tons of kimchi and I didn't understand why yes you can understand lactic acid fermentation, but When you really break it down. I was like, that's it. That's all it is. It's two strains of bacteria that are causing pickles in a lactic acid fermentation, so I Thought that was just a one-off and I was trying to get a compare and contrast because we do make a lot of kimchi which is you know a Korean fermentation and I always thought it was because we're adding proteins usually kimchi is added with some type of seafood Shelfish croaker Oyster fish sauce something and I thought that that protein and I was wrong I've told every cook and I'm totally wrong that that was the reason for the fermentation and has nothing to do with the fermentation We were shocked. I was shocked that the kimchi fermentation process what we have here You know smells completely different, but the sour is the same That sour effervescence is the same that you'd find in sauerkraut kimchi the only difference is there's a lot more I would say fun going on in the kimchi Because it's got heat it's got all sorts of elements, but that has nothing to do with the preservation of it it's the same process you salt the cabbage and It's the same not the same bacteria, but again, it's a lactic acid fermentation We wanted to show you guys a quick four-week Trial of kimchi because traditionally kimchi was something that you'd harvest in the at the peak of of summer and You know right of passage with your family or a mother and you'd pack it in Your your backyard or kimchi jars big big earthen to I Don't even know how to describe it, but You know, you know kimchi when you when you visit my home, so We buried it in the ground we buried a jar on the ground and this goes from one week to four weeks and There's a lot of stuff going on. It's alive and people talk about yogurt It's alive all this culture all this stuff But you really need to understand why it's happening and that's the that's what sort of made Everything so important, which is why I'm trying to share this with you guys because I don't know that much about it And there really isn't that much knowledge It's angry there's a lot of things going on And you could you could control this process To a certain degree, but you know kimchi can be stored for several months just like any other pickled vegetable But it's going to get a little bit more gnarly as the months go by So much so that you know it can blow up actually with so many bubbles, but um It Made me question how we talk cooks made me question again as as a sort of food becomes how should I say I Want to say we're in the realm of post-modernism or whatever, but Comfort food seems to be in Cooks don't want to learn as much as they I want them to learn And you know if they open just a roast chicken or an apple pie I want them to still ask the questions That people are asking the past 15 years and that was why we cook How does something work and it was really important to me that microbiology even if food is on the most simplest level you know fried chicken or You know Simple vegetable on a plate. There's a reason and a place for that. So The question became what do we do with microbiology or back But let me step back a second. There is so little known that scientists actually listen to us it's no they want to hear what we have to say and Harvard has been very very generous in teaching us and sharing us Many many things, but there's a lot of information that just doesn't exist For instance the last census they did on Lactobacillus bacteria was in the mid-1980s and they found 72 strains and I guarantee you there's a lot more out there just like we found Pichia by accident It's a It changed the game for us And I feel that there's a lot more to be found and that's why I feel like I was interesting again talking to Magnus talking to Noma Lars it works in the test kitchen there It was a very comforting thing to know that there are other people with the same struggles and the same Discomfort talking about something that we don't really know all that much about I feel very strongly that because people aren't looking for Things that are microbial on any level. It was interesting to see what The guys at Noma again were doing and Magnus both of them are trying to make their version of miso shiro miso But I feel that they can do it and I I would bet dollars of doughnuts You could do it without an aspergillus string and that would truly be Nordic and that truly Questions what the hell is what you know if you make miso with completely Nordic ingredients with nothing not even the Microbiology that comes from Japan. What do you have? You know, it's not like wine necessarily It's it's something that's completely different. You're not using soy beans. You're using You know a legume that has some type of protein It calls in a question. What is authentic? Come on, so I do believe that you can and I've spoken to other side the guys All over all over the world and I don't think that I'm crazy and saying that but I feel that It may seem very insignificant, but the question of time and place of how that happens I think is has serious repercussions in the culinary world is if you imagine How that works for instance? How can I say something like that would make an analogy garrum, which was the fish sauce that the Romans used a thousand years ago? The old we don't know what it tasted like. We know that it existed But we don't know what it tasted like we can only assume that it tastes a lot like fish sauce right So that puts in the question were Romans making food that tastes a little bit like South East Asian cuisine and you know Again, you have to put it in flavor profiles and understand what the hell is going on And the reason why I say potential criticisms as the next slide is I I feel that there's a Significant part of food critics and cooks that don't want to learn anything new. They just want the simple They want the easy they want to cook authentic and I promise you you could bring everything And try to make authentic Italian food in New York and it's not going to be authentic because you don't have the real terroir and I think that you we can take this to a lot of different levels and it might not make everyone happy, but It's a good example is the dry aging of beef You we talked to meat purvers and they don't even quite know what the hell is going on in their own meat rooms They just know that Historically we we do it at 40 degrees. This is a percentage of the humidity We scrape off the mold and this is how we get our dry aged beef But they don't they've never had the USDA or any government agency discover what the hell is in their aging room and what exact bacteria a fungi and mold is manipulating the meat and Really changing the a fresh piece of beef into a dry aged beef So it's really important that we know that that we're drying beef or you know, how many times have you broken down? Duck or game and the chef just tells you just hang hang it till the head falls off You know when you ask why well, it's gonna just tenderize it That's not a good enough answer anymore We need to know more information and and this is what you know, this is one of the the bacteria that does it I don't even know the name. I'm not even gonna try to remember, but It's a beautiful thing actually if you look at it It looks like a tree and then if it builds up it has this lattice like work and these are the things that make our food taste better and I'm I'm one to think that knowledge is only a good thing You know, you don't have to you don't have to use this, but it's good to know what the hell is going on in your food Well You