I enjoy cooking, but I like simple things. I spend as much time as possible with my BBQ (including in 3 feet of snow in the winter) and generally consider sauces as suspicious attempts to camouflage something unpleasant. Needless to say, when I hear that a chef is going to speak, I prepare to tune out…
Claudio Aprile got my attention, though. A chef, billed as a Molecular Gastronomist, Aprile’s story of his training was hilarious and his demonstration -well, let’s just say that it involved a big vat of liquid nitrogen. Cool!
A naturally curious guy, Aprile described his first job of filling jelly donuts; a job he turned into an experiment, adding increasing amounts of jelly in a search for the explosion point, while watching customers for their reaction to these ticking sugar time bombs. After being fired, he worked as a dish cleaner at a restaurant where he created his own cleaning formula by mixing together any chemicals and agents he could find in the building. That ended with an evacuation requiring the Fire Department to attend. Sounds like a natural Geek.
Now that he’s running the show, Aprile can do stuff like make lemon tarts using liquid nitrogen, sprinkling Pop Rocks candy on top and charging a fortune for it.
