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Feature article
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Wise native a leader in techno-organic food
By Fred Sauceman
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| Sean Brock contemplates peanut-flavored cotton candy during the annual Southern Foodways Symposium at the University of Mississippi. |
As a high school student in Wise, Virginia, Sean Brock hated chemistry.
“I only began to like it when I was able to eat it,” says the young executive chef at McCrady’s Restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina.
Sean’s work with invert sugars and emulsifiers is winning praise nationwide. One of the country’s most celebrated food chemists, Shirley Corriher, calls him “a resourceful chef with the sensibility and creativity to apply chemistry to achieve intense taste.”
Corriher, a Vanderbilt University graduate, is the author of “Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed,” a book that won a James Beard Foundation award for its down-to-earth explanations of kitchen chemistry.
“He’s such a dedicated, hard-working, and really resourceful chef,” Shirley told me. “I just go crazy reading his menu. And his plain old comfort food is great, too.”
At age 10, Sean was cooking Sunday dinner for his family in Wise. He graduated from Johnson & Wales in Charleston and before long was named Nashville’s best chef by the Nashville Scene food critic for his work at The Capitol Grille downtown.
He took over the kitchen at McCrady’s in Charleston in April 2006. The restaurant is steeped in tradition. In 1791 a dinner party was held in its Longroom in honor of George Washington during his Southern tour.
But Sean Brock didn’t let the genteel surroundings confine him.
“He is on the vanguard of the molecular cuisine movement,” says John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance.
I first met Sean Brock during the Nashville Tomato Festival, over a reinterpretation of the BLT, one to which he’d added a slab of catfish, on a bed of heirloom tomatoes.
“Almost a year and a half later, I still get calls for the bacon Sean put on that sandwich,” says Allan Benton, owner of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tennessee.
Sauté pan and spatula are Sean’s kitchen accoutrements. But so, too, are a Styrofoam cooler filled with liquid nitrogen and a cotton candy machine.
As the minus 273-degree Celsius liquid nitrogen in the cooler fogs the kitchen, Sean reaches for three plastic squeeze bottles. From one streams liquefied Wonder Bread. From another, thinned down Welch’s grape jelly. From a third, peanut butter. The result is his playful take on the flavors of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, scooped out of the cooler in the form of shopping mall-style “Dippin’ Dots.”
“I think a sense of humor is important in the kitchen,” Sean says. “I want to figure out how to make Cheetos taste like Allan Benton’s bacon.”
In this the Year of the Pig, he has infused cotton candy with the flavor of country ham.
“I’ve been experimenting with fat-based cotton candy,” Sean says. “Fat is a wonderful thing.”
Versions of cotton candy with bacon, roasted chicken fat, olive oil and truffle oil are now in his techno-organic repertoire.
Next up? An attempt to make breath strips taste like foie gras.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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