The video of her using the coffee maker to prepare a three-course meal of chocolate truffles, shrimp salad, olive oil–poached salmon and asparagus has gotten almost 8 million views.
After a quick stint in the fashion industry, she worked at Tasting Table and EAT Club while attending culinary school at the International Culinary Center in New York before joining Tasty.Īs she’ll tell you, any good chef should be able to cook with anything, so producers in the Hollywood studio stripped the kitchen of all appliances except for the coffee machine and challenged her culinary prowess. We recently caught up with three of the stars behind the creative process at the largest social food network, which reaches more than 300 million people per month, to dish about what makes their unconventional trial-and-error cooking shows so wildly popular and whether it’s really possible to make a three-course meal using only a coffee pot.Īlexis deBoschnek works across recipe development and new formats at Tasty as a senior test kitchen manager. Even if the studio space is in the heart of Hollywood, everybody sets up their own equipment, swaps out the table tops for different sets, buys their own ingredients and, yes, washes their own dishes. They aren’t filmed with a cast of thousands behind the scenes. The price is still being determined, but he anticipates maxing out at about 1,000 servings for the weekend, which will be presented in little boats, just like the Kinseiken Seika Company original.You know you love those viral Tasty food videos from BuzzFeed that have turned the food media world into an upside-down cake.
While some people say it’s like Jell-O, Wong protests that the texture is “nothing like that.” The biggest challenge, he says, has been figuring out how to transport the delicate dessert, which he individually boxes and, of course, necessarily makes ahead of time. Though it’s a very basic combination - and is so elegantly simple that it kind of flies in the face of over-the-top viral sensations like monster milkshakes and rainbow doughnuts - he says he spent months trying to hit upon the correct ratio of agar to spring water. As Wong sees it, the dessert is very much in the Asian tradition, and he tells Grub, “It’s not about flavor or nutrients it’s about the texture.”
His recipe for the cake, he says, contains only agar powder and spring water. Like a lot of people, Wong first discovered the dessert went it went viral in 2014, and later wondered why no one was making it here. (Gelatin is the other obvious choice, but apparently it doesn’t yield a delicate enough result.)
So, agar is the solution that Darren Wong, the advertising professional behind the simply named Smorgasburg rookie Raindrop Cake, went with. That’s because, as one report concludes, it creates the right texture while maintaining the water’s pristine flavor. (But only for a fleeting 30 minutes at room temperature, after which it becomes what you might call “puddle cake.”) When properly made, it should roll and jiggle, but it’s also very fragile and easily broken.Ĭurious internet sleuths investigated how to re-create the dessert, and the consensus appears to be that agar, which is derived from seaweed, is the ideal stabilizer. Rather than glutinous rice, this jelly cake is made from water gathered from the southern Japanese alps, the company says, that is then stabilized with some mysterious substance so it will hold its shape. Like shingen mochi, it comes with kinako, a heavily roasted soybean powder, and kuromitso, or brown sugar syrup, both served on the side. the wobbly water “cake.” True to its name, the sweet actually looks like a suspended water drop, and, well, it pretty much is exactly that.įirst introduced two years ago by Kinseiken Seika Company, the confection is a variation on shingen mochi, a traditional dessert made from a very soft form of mochi known as gyuhi. When Smorgasburg’s outdoor markets return this weekend, it will mark the New York debut of mizu shingen mochi, a.k.a.
The home of the ramen burger will now serve as the American launchpad for Japan’s strangest dessert yet. Kind of the exact opposite of a candy-coated milkshake.