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>> ANTHONY BOURDAIN: In this episode, the sweeter side of Chef David Chang.

>> DAVID CHANG: That's delicious, man.

>> BOURDAIN: Foam two ways.

>> ALEX STUPAK: Creativity is more about taking a second look at something.

>> BOURDAIN: Chang's partner Christina Tosi makes some of her signature dishes from Momofuku Milk Bar.

>> CHRISTINA TOSI: And you're using corn.

Like, there's vegetables in your cooking.

>> BOURDAIN: Arnold Palmer cake, the corn cookie, plus a corn cookie pie, and the ultimate sweet treat, ice cream.

>> DANIEL BURNS: It's highly crutched upon.

>> TOSI: And that's that.

What's that cake?

>> BOURDAIN: Enter the mind of a chef.

>> CHANG: I feel like everyone's made Jell-O before.

Am I wrong in saying that?

>> BOURDAIN: The sweet stuff, dessert.

For children around the world it's the goal of every meal, a reward for enduring another long lunch or dinner full of vegetables.

But great menus are not complete without this final course.

Desserts are left to the pastry chef, the sweet professionals.

>> COURTNEY McBROOM: Can I be kind of like Bill Murray and you can be like Chevy Chase?

>> BOURDAIN: The dessert wizard in Chang's world is Chef Christina Tosi.

She's part owner of Momofuku Milk Bar, and a genius when it comes to sweets.

>> TOSI: We're about to mix the corn cookie.

It is the Milk Bar sleeper cookie.

Everybody that gets a corn cookie always comes back.

We start the corn cookie with butter and sugar.

We cream those two ingredients for a minute or two, and then we add an egg.

And we let the butter, sugar and the egg cream for ten minutes.

We call it our ten-minute creaming process.

Four more seconds.

Three, two, one.

All right.

And you can really tell the difference in color and volume.

That's not sugar granules.

It's all air bubbles.

Scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl.

And you're going to add your dry ingredients.

We have corn flour, AP flour, baking power, baking soda and salt, which is your average cookie leaveners.

And the most secret ingredient to the cookie is freeze dried corn powder.

And we just grind it down into this powder.

And then we just mix it on a low speed until it comes together.

So we just scoop away.

So once we scoop the cookies, we refrigerate them.

And that's kind of the other secret.

You want to make it super cold before you put it in the oven.

Because whenever you put, you know, butter with heat it's going to melt out.

So we're going to take the chilled cookie dough and stick it in a 325-degree oven.

However, if you're baking cookies at home in a conventional oven, which is what most home baker's ovens are, you're going to bake it at 350 degrees for 18 minutes.

So nine minutes is up.

We're going to take a look at the cookie.

These to me are perfectly baked.

Corn for me is, like, the essence of salty and sweet.

It will save the planet, and you're using corn.

Like, there's vegetables in your cookie.

We're going to take the corn cookie a little further.

So one of our favorite things to do with the corn cookie is to transform it into a pie crust.

It usually takes about three cookies.

We put them in a mixing bowl, and we start mushing them up with our hands.

We're basically mimicking a pie crust that you would make, like, with a graham cracker crust.

This corn cookie's baked off really nicely.

And the test to that is mushing them back into a ball.

It's almost like they're cookie dough again.

So if you're not getting a ball, you want to melt a little butter and pour it in, and just kind of knead it into a ball like this.

And then we put it in a pie tin.

So, ten-inch pie shell.

We're just breaking it up one last time to make sure the entire cookie is broken down.

So we start from the center, and then we usually work our way toward the edges.

The secret thing that most people typically overlook is this corner right here.

There's usually too much cookie or pie filling in the center there.

So you're trying to get as even of a crust as possible.

So this is strawberry ice cream from our local bodega.

Strawberry and corn is a great flavor combination.

I left it out of the freezer for a few minutes, just so it's really spreadable and pliable.

This is two pints of ice cream.

I kind of like to have the ice cream pie peak up in the center, so when you get a slice it almost looks like a lemon meringue pie.

Getting a pie with a crust that tasted like a corn cookie is kind of awesome.

We're kind of changing the way you might look at, like, your average cookie and what you can do with it.

You're just, like, giving it a new identity.

>> BOURDAIN: 7:00 AM, Union Square Farmer's Market in New York City.

One of the original vendors here is this man, Rick Bishop.

His Mountain Sweet Berry Farm has been supplying vegetables to some of New York's finest restaurants.

Grown exclusively in his farm in Upstate New York, his Tristar strawberries retain all 51 aromatic compounds of the wild strawberry.

>> RICK BISHOP: It began here in 1985, bringing in the Tristar strawberry.

The Tristar strawberry was developed for flavor.

The French chefs and the little old ladies come up and they're like, "This is what a strawberry's supposed to be."

Tristar is the star of three seasons-- spring, summer and fall.

Traditionally strawberries all come in in June.

The day neutral or Tristar strawberry will keep fruiting on past the longest days of the year.

The cool nights in the Catskill Mountains tend to raise the level of sugar in the strawberries.

The root system doesn't go very far, so we have drip irrigation under black plastic.

We give them a lot of attention.

During the peak of the season, we'll come in with over a hundred flats of strawberries.

At the end of the day they just disappear.

So our basic premise is we're growing things for flavor.

And with the Tristar it's a perfect example of a lot more work, smaller berry, but high quality, good flavor, and it's been very well received in the past 25 years.

>> CHANG: This is one of the first foams that I didn't even realize it was a foam.

We used to do it with, like, tomato water or watermelon juice.

This is the lowest tech sort of modern foam you can make.

So we have strawberry juice.

We just take strawberries, puree it or juice it.

And we have bloomed gelatin sheet.

So this has just been hydrated in water.

So I added the gelatin.

We have an ice bath.

And you just whisk the hell out of it.

And as you aerate it, the gelatin is stabilizing because of the temperature of the ice bath.

We're not letting it set like a normal gel would.

We're disrupting it and filling it with air.

This takes a lot of time.

You just keep on whisking and whisking and whisking.

The colder it is, the more you whisk, and the more air it is.

It's done when it gets to be aerated and it sets up like a Jell-O.

I feel like...

I don't know.

I feel like everyone's made Jell-O before.

Am I wrong in saying that?

It's obviously going to increase in volume.

Put this in the fridge, and it will set up looking something like this.

We have freeze-dried strawberries here.

So the one thing that this dish doesn't have, these strawberries are texture.

And you have strawberries that have just enough lightness and texture that I like.

So this is going to be a more simple of a dish.

We have some sorrel, and right here we have some sorrel juice, made from the sorrel leaves.

So it's got just a tinge of acidity.

We're going to garnish it with a little olive oil.

And we're going to garnish with a little salt as well.

You could serve it just like this, but we want to add another textural component.

So we have yogurt.

You could use buttermilk.

You can make a snow out of it.

But that would be a very simple dish.

But it's probably the lowest tech of using strawberries.

We made it non low tech when we added a dairy component using powder.

But this is just a simple... very simple dessert.

This is Daniel Burns.

One thing that Burns loves more than Moises Alou is ice cream.

And he loves his Moises Alou.

>> BURNS: Ice cream, I actually love it more than most things.

There's many more than two ways to make ice cream.

But the most classic is anglaise.

So that's how your grandmother would have made it, with half milk, half cream, and a lot of egg yolks.

All right, so starting with anglaise.

It's always the quality of the milk.

You need milk that has a grassy flavor, that is... >> CHANG: So basically like everything else, the better the milk, the more delicious the ice cream's going to be.

>> BURNS: Better the end product.

>> CHANG: And he just added cream.

>> BURNS: Cream, yes.

So very little cream to the milk.

You saw that.

>> CHANG: Can you have made ice cream without cream?

>> BURNS: Of course you can.

Yes, of course you can.

So with all that cream left out, we're going to add milk powder.

So milk powder helps when it's freezing-- then the ice crystals are less likely to form.

And it just helps in the general stability of the end product.

>> CHANG: Would you say that milk powder is like the nicotine of the pastry world?

>> BURNS: It's highly crutched upon.

>> CHANG: yes.

>> BURNS: To the egg yolks we can now add sugar.

And this is 145 trimiline.

Grandma wouldn't have used trimiline, but all it is an invert sugar.

So what invert sugar is, it's basically regular sugar and water taken up to a certain temperature and let cool back down.

So when it cools back down it comes into this paste.

All we want to do to make the anglaise, heat this to about 50 degrees, 50-60 degrees, and then you pour a small amount into the egg yolks mixture.

So we have the actual anglaise base here, and we're going to heat it just to 75.

We hold it to 75 to ensure that it's going to be set, and then also to pasteurize it.

It just reached 75.

So we just strain it, ensure that there's no lumps, then we just put it straight on to ice.

Once you have the good anglaise then you can start working with any types of flavorings to this actual base.

What we're going to do with this one is actually make a strawberry ice cream.

So, very simply, you're going to take 500 grams of the base that we made.

We're going to use some Boiron strawberry puree.

Some freeze-dried strawberries just to enhance the flavor.

Sometimes you can just enhance or change the set of the ice cream by also adding some gelatin.

All we did, we melted the gelatin with some of the base, and then I'm just simply just going to hand blend it into the anglaise that we made earlier.

And now we can just take this, put it straight into Pacojet container.

In a proper freezer in this type of container will only take, say, four hours.

So we're going to do a dessert with peas and strawberries.

So basically all we did was we made a mousse out of peas.

>> CHANG: Which is delicious.

>> BURNS: To which we'll just dust it also with some pea powder.

So we have a strawberry and rhubarb compote here that we're going to use in combination with the peas.

Made a crumble with quinoa.

>> CHANG: Quinoa is a grain.

>> BURNS: Quinoa's a grain.

Also we have some strawberry meringues.

And then just the ice cream that we just made.

>> CHANG: It's the study of strawberries, you know.

You have a compote, you've got an ice cream, you have an unripe strawberry.

>> BURNS: And that's basically the dessert.

>> CHANG: That's delicious, man.

We have Alex Stupak in the house.

He has his own restaurant now called Empellon.

In your previous life, you were a pastry chef.

If we were going to talk about foams, I thought we had to have Stupak in the house.

>> STUPAK: I'm going to show you one of the most useful foams I've ever seen in my life.

So this is 500 grams of skim milk.

And we just scraped a vanilla bean into it.

Some places use skim milk for their cappuccino foam.

It's not as flavorful, but it foams up better.

And again, the reason why... >> CHANG: Less fat.

>> STUPAK: Yeah, no fat, and it has a ton of protein.

To make this foam we actually have to heat it up.

We're going to stabilize it with a couple of hydrocolloids that get along really well with dairy products.

Guar gum and iota carrageenan.

And iota carrageenan is almost always used exclusively in dairy, because it has a synergy with calcium.

We have our vanilla infused skim milk.

On low speed.

2.5 grams of iota carrageenan.

We're going to drop in 2.5 grams of guar gum.

Just before I add the sugar, you proably see...

I mean, you can see already just by blending it, some air bubbles are already being caught in there.

If you let this cool a little bit, it would actually probably form a very soft gel.

Hundred grams of sugar.

We're just going to pour our milk mixture.

This one is going to be more like Cool Whip, or whipped cream, something like that.

Now, this is a foam by definition.

>> CHANG: We aerated it.

>> STUPAK: We forced air into something.

But it's actually whipped skim milk.

I mean, we've actually made our own fat-free dairy topping.

>> CHANG: Don't tell anybody, dude.

>> STUPAK: You got us some strawberries.

So we're making a dessert out of strawberries here.

We're going to pipe this foam onto the plate, the skim milk foam.

You could just dollop it onto a plate.

You could do whatever you wanted with it.

But I just found that it piped really well.

So we're just putting it in a piping bag.

You can see, like, this foam looks like a noodle on the plate.

So this is just some brown butter that we infused with some orange zest and some Thai basil.

And those are just some things that to me taste logical.

Some Thai basil leaves to actually just sort of echo the flavor that's infused in that butter.

We're going to add our other foam to the mix, the orange blossom foam.

This one you actually have to push it off the spoon.

And other than that we made some soy milk sorbet.

I also really enjoy the flavor of soy milk with strawberries.

And I'll just perch it on that basil leaf.

>> CHANG: That is beautiful.

>> STUPAK: It could be raspberry, it could be smoked water, it could be tomato, it could be anything.

It's the method that sets you free, and it makes that sandbox that you're playing in a little bit bigger.

I mean, at the end of the day, creativity is more about taking a second look at something.

>> TOSI: We make layer cakes at Milk Bar.

They're multi-tiered with different textures and nuances that all kind of play into the same theme.

So this one is all about Arnold Palmer, the golfing legend.

It is a lemon tea cake.

Our Arnold Palmer layer cake has a lemon tea cake, lemon marscapone, almond tea crunch, and an Arnold Palmer jelly.

>> McBROOM: It's an American classic.

>> TOSI: It's an American classic.

>> McBROOM: Like golf itself.

>> TOSI: Yeah, like golf itself.

This is my esteemed colleague Courtney McBroom.

>> McBROOM: Hi.

It's tea time.

it's tea time.

>> TOSI: We start with a plugra butter and some granulated sugar.

Goes in a stand mixer and we cream it.

We add eggs one by one, add some grapeseed oil and some buttermilk, and then we have some lemon juice and some lemon extract.

And we're going to add the dry ingredients.

What makes this a lemon tea cake is the tea.

We literally just clip open some Lipton tea bags, and then we use the ground down tea leaves as part of the flavoring of the cake.

We toss the dry ingredients together, and then we're going to throw them in the mixer.

The dry ingredients are fully incorporated, so we're going to spread it over a sheet pan, throw it in the oven to bake.

Courtney is going to heat up some water and make a bitter tea.

>> McBROOM: I'm going to brew this tea for about five minutes, and then I'm going to pour it into here.

This is sugar, pectin, and instant tea, then I just poured in the bitter tea soak along with some lemon juice.

I'm just going to bring that to a boil.

And let it cool.

And once it's cool it will become really thick, like a jelly.

>> TOSI: For the middle textural layer of the cake is our almond tea crunch.

It's some almond butter, some slivered almonds toasted lightly, some fuotine, which is like little pieces of toasted crepe or cookie, little flakes of those, some confectioners sugar, some salt, and some instant tea powder.

We use instant Lipton tea powder with a little bit of lemon in it to kind of bump up the Arnold Palmer flavor in the cake.

So we're just going to paddle this together for one second.

Our almond tea crunch is done.

So Courtney is working on the lemon curd, which is going to be part of the lemon mascarpone layer of the cake.

>> McBROOM: This is sugar, lemon juice, and eggs.

And I'm whisking them over medium low heat.

I'm going to add the gelatin, and then I'm going to add this butter.

And the butter is going to melt in there, and it's going to be lemon curd.

>> TOSI: So once the lemon curd's cooled in the fridge similar to this consistency, because we want to be able to layer it in the cake, we're going to mix that in a bowl with some mascarpone.

Our lemon tea cake was in the oven for about 30 minutes.

Just like your standard American cake, you're looking for it to bounce back to the touch when it's in the oven.

You're looking for it to come off the edges just a little bit.

To layer our cakes, the secret to getting just enough cake to make the three layers is to cut out two six-inch circles.

And then the last layer is kind of going to be like the junky, put together layer.

But there's no shame in that.

We build all of our six-inch cakes with acetate so we can build them high.

We're going to take all of our cake scraps and make our junky bottom layer.

No one will ever know.

And then we're going to use the bitter tea soak that Courtney made to moisten the cake.

And this will also help kind of fake the cake layer.

>> McBROOM: Can I be kind of like Bill Murray and you can be like Chevy Chase in Caddyshack?

>> TOSI: So our cake is soaked.

We're going to start layering.

So we have the lemon mascarpone.

Courtney will spread it around.

Half of the almond tea crunch, one-third of the Arnold Palmer tea jelly, then your kind of second jinkiest or second prettiest layer goes in.

It gets soaked again with the bitter tea soak.

So we're going to do the last of the lemon mascarpone again, madam, the last of the of your almond tea crunch, your second third of jelly, and then your top layer.

Save the nicest for last, because that's the one that people are going to see.

The top layer of the cake we save a little extra Arnold Palmer tea jelly for.

The assembly part of the cake you'd think should be really fussy, but it's not fussy.

It's fun.

We freeze all of our cakes.

As soon as we layer them we stick them in the freezer for about three hours or overnight.

Choose your favorite cake plate, and remove the acetate.

And that's that.

>> McBROOM: I's a real hole in one, this cake.

>> BOURDAIN: So there you have it.

>> CHANG: It's delicious.

>> BOURDAIN: Chef David Chang's sweeter side.

>> TOSI: We're kind of changing the way you might look at it.

You're just, like, giving it a new identity.

>> CHANG: You can set this aside, and it's very easy, it's delicious.

Everyone has made Jell-O, right?