Review: Listen to your food at Burdock and Co. sound dinners in Vancouver
Burdock & Co:
Taste Sound dinners
Where:
2702 Main St.
When:
Sept. 25 and Nov. 20
Info:
604-879-0077 and
Andrea Carlson, humbly, and with zero swagger, has been a visionary chef for over 30 years. A locavore well before it hit our lexicon, the first to dare a 100-mile tasting menu, and when Sooke Harbour House was a beacon of sustainable, local, daredevil cuisine, she was part of the cliff-edge team that invented new dishes daily.
More recently, she’s established her own unique cuisine at the 13-year-old Burdock & Co., where she’s the only female owner-chef with a Michelin star in Canada. Her food synchronizes and praises B.C.’s forests, seas and organic farmers. She flies on the wings of her solid technical, but unconventional, cooking skills.
So! When she does something a little woo-woo in her restaurant, I trust she’s enlightening our food culture. That’s my take on the Taste Sound collaboration dinners that she and Tarun Nayar, a musician and biologist, put on four times a year. At those dinners, guests enjoy Burdock food, but they also clamp on headphones to listen to some of the plants on the menu — that is, to their unique bio-electric energy. It’s kind of like listening to their heart beats.
The duo’s mission is simple. “With farm to table, you get to know your farmer,” says Carlson. “This is another level to literally connect with food, to acknowledge in real time, that your food has energy, a life force that gives you life force. That’s a huge part of my motivation.”
The collab is a perfect symbiosis, she says. “We really geek out on nature. We love the natural world and want people to experience it in our dining room. It’s profound because it’s so unexpected in this context. I find the music coming off foods and their differences in expression is so dramatic. It smacks you in the face.”
Nayar, a musician (tabla-playing founding member of the local group, Delhi 2 Dublin) and marine biologist, says: “The whole point is to turn it into an embodied experience. You have headphones on, you’re eating some fresh berries. I plug into those berries (via synthesizer) and something happens that’s quite immediate and emotional. It’s not just philosophical. People feel it profoundly.”
The meal welcomes revelations — spiritual, philosophical, scientific, Alice Through The Looking Glass — whatever you make of it. When I attended one such dinner, listening to the life force of plants, I felt gratitude and awe for the nourishing gift of plants.
Nayar (aka Modern Biology) now travels the world with the Taste Sound dinners that were blueprinted at Burdock and he also offers listening experiences in nature or parks with his custom-built synthesizer.
Burdock’s regular tasting menu changes six times a year with moon phases and ingredients available at that time. The full moon, Carlson says, commonly marks seasonal changes, timing for planting, harvesting, hunting and gathering. The Taste Sound dinners feature a shorter version of the chef’s tasting menu and costs $200 per person.
When I attended in May, the menu was called gathering resins under a budding moon, featuring resinous ingredients.
“In spring, I think of sugar shacks and saps flowing and fresh cottonwood buds covered in resinous sap,” Carlson explained.
We started with three snacks: scallop with escabeche and resinous notes in fir tip granita; morels with pine nuts and burdock, with a maple syrup and pine resin glaze; a profiterole stuffed with asparagus, elderflower, and Salt Spring Island Romelia cheese — “it had a limited expression of resin,” Carlson admitted.
Progressing through dinner, we donned headphones which glowed a luminous violet, as Nayar created music using the synthesized sounds of plant activity.
A nettle and ricotta raviolo, topped with poplar stem cream, had a milky brodo sauce with resinous black cottonwood bud oil. For a sablefish dish, Carlson glazed the fish with fermented spruce syrup and served it with pickled porphyra seaweed veil (local nori), sake butter sauce, XO-fried radish shiitake mushroom cake with spruce tips, and a milk bun. Dessert was a honey cake with oxidized pear sorbet and beeswax-infused custard, flavoured with Sortilège (a liqueur with Canadian whisky and maple syrup), and bee pollen.
“Beeswax isn’t technically resin but it’s resinous in character. I love it — it’s so witchy and magical and elusive to capture. I first tasted it in a French canelé. There was beeswax in the mould and it was ‘oh wow,’” says Carlson.
For a mignardise, Carlson made Japanese kohakutou, a crystalline Japanese wagashi confection. Hers incorporated faint notes of pine pitch into it.
Nayar plugged us into sounds of several plants during dinner, including pear, which was in our dessert. In my opinion, pear sounds like a marimba with a popping, carefree timbre. “The bio data converter allows me to turn bio electrical activity into notes, rhythms and compositions,” he said in geek-speak.
Hearing food during a meal can influence taste, he says. “Research in gastrophysics suggests that different sound frequencies can affect taste. For example, high frequencies can enhance sweetness while low frequencies can bring out bitterness. Sounds affect flavour and that’s what’s exciting.”
Scientists have studied electrical activity in plants since the late 1800s, and much has been written about how they can communicate with each other — chemically, electromagnetically, through root and fungal networks — and one author has even claimed that plants can react to human emotions and music. (Although eyes have rolled at the latter.)
“For the most part, people are unaware plants have nervous systems analogous to ours and they are moved to find that food is alive,” says Nayar. “There’s that wow! moment where they think there’s better ways to relate to their food.”
For Carlson, it deepens her reverence for plants. “It opens the mind once you hear their expressions. It’s like seeing something you can’t unsee and it subconsciously informs you. I think the scientific world is quite far behind.”
The next Taste Sound dinner at Burdock will be on Sept. 25. It’s called submerging stones under the sturgeon moon. “There’s a lore that if you write down your troubles, tie the paper to a rock and throw it in the river, a sturgeon will carry your troubles far, far away,” Carlson says. (And gosh no, you will not be listening to synthesized sturgeon sounds. Plants only!) The last Taste Sound dinner for the year will be on Nov. 20 with a radicchio theme.
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Source: vancouversun.com