"wd-50" news and stories

Diners at Le Fooding. Photo: Pabo76/Flickr

What happens when the best French and American chefs of the moment converge on New York City for a weekend of casual culinary madness, all in the name of charity?

It's called Le Fooding D'Amour Paris-New York. The two-day event took place in Long Island City, N.Y. at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and included tasting stations by David Chang (Momofuku), Wylie Dufresne (WD~50), Yves Camdeborde (Le Comptoir du Relais), Sean Rembold (Diner), William LeDeuil (Ze Kitchen Galerie), Christophe Pelé (Bigarrade) and more.

Slashfood attempted to try as many of the dishes on offer as possible, considering the long, snaking lines and lack of lighting at the outdoor venue.

Check out our photos after the jump.

A curious thing happened Tuesday in New York City. A Michelin-starred chef fiddled with a microwave.

It might not be considered so odd as the chef in question was culinary experimenter Wylie Dufresne, who took to the dining room of his restaurant, WD-50, to make an egg dish with a microwave.

"I think microwaves are pretty neat," Dufresne said before his demonstration. The chef uses three standard microwaves in his kitchen and has been testing out this new model for the last three weeks.

"We realized we could poach in the microwave," he said. But it takes time ... 29 minutes to be precise.

Hear how he uses metal in the microwave after the jump.

In my roundup of yesterday's New York Times food section, I somehow overlooked an interesting article about restaurants that are serving fruit in caviar form. As with much of the mad science cooking coming out of restaurants like WD-50 and Alinea, creating caviar-like pearls of food can be traced back to El Bulli's Ferran Adriá. Basically, the caviar is made by combining some sort of fruit base with sodium alginate, a gelling agent, and sodium citrate, an anticoagulant. The thickened fruit mixture is then dribbled into a solution of water and calcium chloride, a common preservative. Pictured here is WD-50's cocoa caviar with beet and tangerine ravioli. Ah, science.

[Photo: Joyce Dopkeen, NYT]