Marcel Vigneron, the pompadoured, rapping twit from last season’s Top Chef, has scammed his way into an (frustratingly interesting) short profile on Wired.com, where he shows some tricks of the “molecular gastronomy” trade. He’s concocted three things: the “Cyber Egg,” which is some sort of weird-ass agar-firmed coconut milk thing that is anything but an actually egg; a potato with truffle espuma, foamed (because it wouldn’t be Marcel if there weren’t any foam); and coffee “caviar,” the same stuff Marcel used towards the end of last season by dropping coffee mixed with sodium alginate into calcium chloride to form little pearls of coffee.
I’ll never make any of this junk, but it makes for a neat slideshow, of which Wired has three.
Urg, writing about this guy just reminds me how much the last half of the second season of Top Chef pissed me off, as Marcel minced around the kitchen playing pariah, bringing out the worst behavior of the other remaining contestants. Sam should have won, damn it.
Tasty Molecules From a Top Chef [Wired]
That Cyber-Egg is almost a straight copy of a dish from wd-50 in New York.
http://www.foodite.com/foodite/2007/04/marcel_of_top_c.html
We went to Moto in Chicago last weekend, which is the same kind of stuff. beet foam, buttered popcorn puree, edible menus and whatnot. The most visually impressive thing was the “nachos” which were actually a desert. they had gotten chocolate to resemble in appearance and texture ground beef. Gotta say, though, it made me one gassy mofo. Maybe I’m allergic to things cooked with liquid nitrogen.
My hatred for Marcel is surpassed by nothing. I wish Cliff would have accidentally injured him severely in that late season snafu, so that he would have been unable to continue on. Fucking jerk. I must say though, Ilan was kind of a bitch also. The tattletaling was one of the more uncomfortable moments in recent reality television history.