Has Watermelon Been Cured?

It all started with a watermelon

Well, that’s not exactly true. It started with an email from Cured/18th&21st announcing their new chef.

Harry Doyle Here - Introducing Chef Christina - And Restaurant Weeks!

Below the information were their Restaurant Week menus. Take a look at the first item.

Starters: Compressed Watermelon.

Wait, what? Yes, you read that correctly.

COMPRESSED WATERMELON: grilled peaches, burrata, pistachios, blackberry balsamic

Just think for a minute. What would happen if you compressed watermelon? Envision the scenario: take a slice of watermelon (no rind) and put weight on it. Press hard. Get the picture?

Squish! You now have watermelon juice. And a mess. This seems like it would be a great sensory activity for preschoolers.

But this is clearly not meant to be a beverage. That would be Watermelon Squash.

I did some research and it turns out that compressed watermelon is a thing. A culinary thing. It is achieved by placing the fruit in a special plastic envelope and hooking it up to a vacuum seal device. By removing the air you somehow intensify the flavor of the watermelon.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: you can, with the proper equipment, “take an ordinary watermelon to another level.”

How to Make Compressed Watermelon, Salt, Butter, Smoke website.

Friends, if you wanted to take an ordinary watermelon to another level you could also bring it along on an airplane ride or even down to the basement.

But this is the world of fine dining. This is culinary art. Think marinating, macerating, flambé, brûlée, sous vide. So, who am I to laugh at a compressed watermelon?

In fact, it turns out that I can’t even complain that this is some newfangled idea. I can find references to compressed watermelon going back more than ten years. (Clearly I am not up to date on the latest gastronomic trends.)

It just so happens that I adore watermelon. I consider it to be the perfect food. I don’t really understand why anyone would think it needs tweaking. On the other hand, I didn’t know until I visited my sister in Indiana that you can eat frozen chunks of watermelon and that was a revelation.

If you should decide to decompress with a visit to Cured/18th & 21st during Restaurant Weeks, let me know if you tried the watermelon.

Village Green/Town² Comments

Comments

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents. When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word. Days passed. They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts. Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public. So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that. But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...

Separate and Unequal

Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not. It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...

Village Green/Town²

Search This Blog