Slinging mud: Chefs create dishes that look like dirtSlinging mud: Chefs create dishes that look like dirt

Bret Thorn

Chefs have long been inspired by the beauty of nature’s bounty, from vibrantly colored fruits and vegetables to delicate herbs, but lately many of them have taken on a less attractive muse: dirt.

Fueled by a focus on farm-to-table cuisine as well as the proliferation of the techniques of molecular gastronomy, chefs are making what they usually dub “soil” from such varying ingredients as chocolate cookie crumbs, beets and mushrooms.

“If I serve it with vegetables and it’s meant to look like dirt, I call it dirt,” says Sean Brock, executive chef of McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C. “I’m able to spend the day in the garden, and that’s an experience, walking and smelling and picking.”

He says serving elements that look like dirt “helps get the diners moving in that direction.”

For example, he confits small Nicola potatoes in pork fat, peels them, deep-fries them, tosses them in parsley and serves them on a leek purée. Then on top of them he puts a “dirt” made of the dried potato skins which he puts in a food processor with black garlic and powdered milk that he browns in butter. Sticking out of the potatoes are blanched and shocked parsley branches, “so it literally looks like a potato field,” Brock says.

At Gilt in New York City, Justin Bogle dehydrates maitake mushrooms, grinds them along with a mixture of sugar, salt, all-purpose flour and almond flour, sifts that through a tamis and then mixes it with melted butter and walnut oil. He spreads that on a sheet tray, bakes it, breaks it up and passes it through a strainer again, “so you get a really fine consistency,” Bogle says.

In the spring he served it with sprouted lentils, carrots and peas coming out of it.

“Just trying to replicate a garden,” he says, “and it added a nice, earthy crunch to round out the dish.”

Other chefs are also using similar techniques to get back to nature.

“I think people enjoy the whole local, seasonal thing, and this mimics it,” says Mike Sheerin, the chef of Blackbird in Chicago.

That’s the intention of Dominique Crenn, the chef de cuisine of Luce in San Francisco, who dehydrates black Niçoise olives, grinds them finely and then adds dried rye breadcrumbs that she grinds in a food processor.

That’s sifted to get rid of the extra-fine bits so the bread resembles fine gravel. She mixes the two components together—60 percent rye and 40 percent olive—for a soil-rock combination.

Hector Santiago of Pura Vida in Atlanta uses sesame seeds to resemble the white flecks in potting soil for his “fragrant chocolate soil,” which he served with deep-fried foie gras this past spring as a small-plate dish.

“All the flavors I use with foie gras are very soil-y, burnt-like flavors,” he says, so making something that looks like soil made sense. He deveined the liver and then soaked it in milk with Mexican cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, clove and coriander. He slow-cooked it, froze it, and then deep-fried it “basically to bring it to temperature and caramelize the outside.

The soil was chocolate shortbread that he ground, and then he added bits of candied tangerine and ginger, along with sesame seed. He gave it a more earthy, muddy texture, and sesame flavor, by mixing it with sesame oil.

For obvious reasons, chocolate is an easy fit for making food that looks like soil. Dishes like that have long had a role on kids’ menus—often as chocolate pudding with chocolate cookies crumbled on top along with jelly worms and other items that tap the gross-out factor that’s desirable to many seven-year-old boys.

They did something similar at avant-garde Chicago restaurant Moto, where they filled miniature flower pots half way with mint ice cream and topped each with cocoa nibs, a thick mint custard, and on top chocolate cake ground in a food processor with butter. A mint sprig poked out of the “soil.”

“That’s probably one of the first dishes that we had,” says pastry chef Ben Roche.

At the other end of the spectrum are genuinely earthy-tasting ingredients, like beets.

Jeremy Fox, the chef of Ubuntu in Napa, Calif., makes his “soil” by dehydrating the pulp left over from making beet juice and then crushing it in a mortar with hazelnuts, sea salt and olive oil.

At Blackbird, Sheerin’s soil is also made from beets.

He shreds the root vegetables and then dries them overnight before pulverizing them into powder. Then he adds sugar, almond flour and all-purpose flour. He freezes that mixture to “bring it all together.” Then he grates it and bakes it to give it a nutty flavor.

He uses that to coat Tasmanian sea trout, which he serves with hummus, roasted white beets, candied Seville oranges and dill. Sheerin’s intention wasn’t to mimic dirt, but to make the dish look and taste better.

“We wanted to add a little texture to the salmon itself,” Sheerin explains. “We enjoyed the flavor combination of salmon and beets together, and we wanted them to be really intermingled. So you have this beautiful orange, translucent piece of fish and then the top layer is this vibrant, almost electric, purple.”

For John Shields, a former sous chef at Charlie Trotter’s and Alinea in Chicago, making food that looks like soil is his attempt to emulate the surroundings of his current job as chef of Town House in Chilhowie, Va. He makes food that looks like rocks and moss and wood, too.

“We’re surrounded by rolling hills and lots of forest and growth everywhere, so it makes sense for us to be inspired by nature.”

He has a dish called “purple mountains,” because that’s what it looks like.

“It’s actually a yogurt sorbet,” Shields says, coated with macaroons that have been pulverized into a powder and mixed with powdered anise for color and flavor.

He shapes the mountains on an “anti-griddle,” a cold plate that can go to as low as minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. He rolls them in the macaroon crumbs to give them a rocky look.

He also serves smaller hills alongside made of buttercream flavored with anise and pastis. “Classically, macaroons are filled with buttercream,” Shields points out. The mountains are nestled on a mocha “curd” and surrounded with black sesame oil.

He makes food that looks like rocks by coloring a paste of walnut milk, walnuts, and walnut oil with some squid ink, just for color, freezing it in liquid nitrogen and then smashing it with a hammer.

To make soil, he mixes coffee, cocoa, walnut oil, butter, maltodextrin and a little buckwheat flour and pulverizes that.

“A pastry chef might think of streusel,” he points out.

Shields uses similar techniques to make chocolate truffles look like rock formations.

The farm-to-table movement is an inspiration for the serving of food that looks like soil—and if it’s chocolate soil it taps comfort food cravings. But it’s the avant-garde science-based culinary movement that’s giving chefs the tools.

That movement popularized both dehydration and the use of liquid nitrogen, and also maltodextrin, a favorite ingredient of Jason Santos, chef of Gargoyles on the Square in Somerville, Mass.

A tapioca derivative, maltodextrin absorbs fat and turns it into powder.

“If you take truffle oil and maltodextrin, turn it into a powder, run it through a sieve and put it in a pan with some heat, it comes together into little pebbles,” he says. “So that’s pretty cool. You can do pebbles, dirt, rocks, whatever you want. We like to put some edible flowers in it, or pumpkin seeds in chocolate dirt.

“You can do freeze-dried pea powder, corn soil, tomato soil, anything freeze-dried works really well,” he says.— [email protected]