HERE’S how Loretta Keller, the chef at Coco500 in San Francisco, makes chocolate cake, one of her trademark desserts: She melts butter and chocolate together, stirs in egg yolks, sugar and flour, and adds beaten egg whites. She bakes and cools the cake, refrigerates it for two hours to give it the texture she likes, and brings it to room temperature before serving with whipped cream.
And here’s how Will Goldfarb, the chef at Room 4 Dessert in NoLIta, makes one of his specialties, as outlined on his Web site, willpowder.net: “Bring 100 ml milk to a boil with sugar,” it begins. Infuse roasted cocoa seeds and coffee beans, it adds, going on:
“Strain, and purée 100 ml infusion with methylcellulose following instructions for hydration. Bring to 80-90C then rapidly chill to 4C. Warm remaining 300 ml milk to dissolve gelatin: reserve at 35C. Begin whipping methylcellulose base in mixer, slowly adding gelatin base and making a stable mousse. Freeze in molds, unmold, and warm to order in the salamander.”
Gender differences in professional cooking probably go back to the hunters and gatherers — more precisely, to the day it first occurred to the hunters to award four stars to themselves and none to the gatherers. But rarely have the differences seemed as stark as they do now, when the chefs winning some of the most bedazzled press coverage in memory belong to a breed of culinary artists who are overwhelmingly male.
These chefs are devotees of Ferran Adrià, whose El Bulli restaurant, on the Costa Brava of Spain a couple of hours from Barcelona, produces lengthy meals made up of dozens of little chemistry experiments — food that has been wreaked into powders, foams, extrusions and gels designed to deliver head-spinning doses of flavor, texture and aroma. It’s a rarefied cuisine, to say the least, calling for kitchens outfitted like laboratories and grocery lists headed by liquid nitrogen.
Yet it has changed the definition of greatness in restaurant cooking. Today a chef needs the most advanced technology, not just the ripest peaches, to qualify for stardom. Last fall Gourmet magazine named Alinea — the Chicago restaurant known as the leading exemplar of Adrià-inspired cooking in America — best in country.
But where are the women? They’ve long been underrepresented in the upper echelons of restaurant cooking. But the imbalance is even more stark in the realm of laser-incinerated cornstarch. Round up all the women entranced by high-tech cuisine in America, and they could easily fit into a Jacuzzi. Some of the most experienced female chefs are persuaded that the new cuisine will never attract many women. It’s just too ... male.
“It’s not very nourishing emotionally,” said Ann Cooper, author of “ ‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen,’ ” a history of female chefs in America. “This is a huge generalization, but women’s cooking has always been based on nurturing. Tall food was a male invention; women weren’t doing much of it. Basically, women feed people.”
Yet the few women who do work in the new culinary laboratories tell a different story. They don’t feel like interlopers or male impersonators. They’re simply becoming chefs — and they’re doing it in an entirely different way from the women who preceded them.
Traditionally, the only way for an ambitious woman to get experience in the world of professional cooking was to plunge into the chaos of a typical testosterone-driven restaurant kitchen. That’s if she was lucky enough to get in the door in the first place. (California has long been an exception: female-friendly kitchens have been standard there ever since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971.) But when it comes to the new cuisine, the old rules don’t seem to apply.
Pamela Yung, for instance, didn’t have to steel herself to face a hostile French kitchen, nor did she train in California. She didn’t train anywhere. After majoring in computer science and design at the University of Michigan, she was working in a Detroit design firm when she saw a notice on eGullet, the food-maven Web site. Mr. Goldfarb was about to open Room 4 Dessert and needed a stagiaire, or trainee, who would work long hours for low pay. “On a whim, I e-mailed him,” said Ms. Yung, 24.
She started work the day the before the restaurant opened. “I was completely overwhelmed,” she said. “I just did whatever I was told.” But she wasn’t intimidated by the machinery, and today she’s a believer, perfectly comfortable turning out white beer sorbets, Earl Grey tea panna cottas and apricot flake salt.
“The machines just give you more options,” she said. “They’re not traditional cooking utensils, but they’re cooking utensils, and they’re going to become the norm.”
Her best friend in the food world is Rosio Sanchez, also 24, who studied pastry in the Cordon Bleu program in Chicago and worked briefly at Park Avenue Cafe before being hired by Alex Stupak, the pastry chef at WD-50 on the Lower East Side. “I was very nervous,” Ms. Sanchez said. “So many chemicals — gums, methylcellulose, maltodextrin.”
But she credited Mr. Stupak and Wylie Dufresne, the founder of WD-50, with running a nonhierarchical kitchen where beginners, including women, can thrive. “It’s a great place to get trained,” she said. “We’ve got total access to all the ingredients, and anyone with free time will grab stuff and try things. If you mess up, nobody yells at you, because we’re all trying to learn.”
Then there’s Danielle Soranno, 23, a station chef at Alinea who had a few years of professional cooking when she started there four months ago. Although she is the only woman among 30 cooks, she said she has nothing but admiration for how the place runs. “This is the smoothest, cleanest, best-organized kitchen I’ve ever seen,” she said.
What’s more, women working in the new mode say they don’t feel they are missing out on the elemental satisfactions of traditional cooking. Elena Arzak, the much-praised Spanish chef at her family’s century-old Restaurante Arzak in San Sebastian, was profoundly influenced by El Bulli and is developing her own take on Mr. Adrià’s innovations. But she insisted that a chemistry-based cuisine can be as warm and personal as any other. “The science just helps me cook,” she said.
Ms. Soranno pointed out that the cooks at Alinea have to know all the classics — stocks, reductions, even cakes — as well as be able to experiment. (She admitted that she likes to make soup and bake bread on her days off.) Ms. Yung is just happy to be in the business of feeding people. “It’s so natural and fundamental,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to cook. So I’m giving someone foam, instead of a piece of cake. What’s the difference?”
The women who work in these new-style kitchens say ideas and open-mindedness are the currency, not vitriol and bravado, and that the heavy lifting is not physical but intellectual. David Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York, said that women are just as intrigued as men when he gives demonstrations of the new ingredients and techniques. “I don’t think this mode of cooking is skewed by gender,” he said.
Maybe all the machines and chemicals are contributing to a revolution other than the one about frozen air and warm gelatin. “Restaurant kitchens were organized like military brigades, because that was the only way to turn out such a volume of work and make all the fast decisions that were necessary,” said Mr. Goldfarb of Room 4 Dessert. “Now it’s more like the modern military, using technology as opposed to brute strength.”
But many women dreaming of a restaurant career still may not see the appeal of a laboratory kitchen. Ms. Yung and Ms. Sanchez have been struck by how few women are in high-end restaurant kitchens of any sort. “We’re always wondering where the girls are,” Ms. Yung said.
Maybe settling on an official name for the movement would help. The chief contenders — “space age,” “hypermodern” or “extreme” cuisine — come straight from boys’ comic books. But in America, at least, the movement has a history its partisans never talk about — a history that happens to be packed with women.
It was the home economists of the late 19th century who first had the idea of transforming the old-fashioned kitchen into a sleek, modern chemistry lab, so that cooking would no longer be seen as traditional women’s drudgery but would rise to the status of a science worthy of the finest male mind. Why not acknowledge these roots and call it “Celebrity Home Ec”?
If women do start showing up in the new technocooking in significant numbers, Gabrielle Hamilton, who provides unpretentious but flavor-packed food at her restaurant, Prune, in the East Village, will be watching with interest.
“Historically, when women move into men’s work it loses value,” she said. “Maybe we’ll see the pay drop, and the science suddenly getting called ‘soft.’ I’ll say this: If you see me doing foams at Prune, you’ll know the whole thing has gone down the tube.”
