Smart Kitchen

So as I've said before, I was to spend my birthday in PEI. Thankfully, the night before, I had spent some serious time at the Shellfish festival, and we'd gotten a couple contacts with things to do the following day. First, we visited the New Holland College, where "The Smartest Kitchen in Canada" is located. The day before I had met the chef in charge of the operation, and been invited for a tour around. Obviously I obliged.

The kitchen is incredible. Upon entering, there is a sleek boardroom and display kitchen, obviously meant to impress executives of some of the companies they work with. Basically it's an analytical kitchen, designed for the purposes of breaking down food into it's most basic components and then figure out how to make it last longer, appear better, taste better, crunch better, you name it. Basically, Allen and his posse work with large companies to improve products from numerous standpoints, while trying to minimize the ingredients involved and preserve the flavour as much as possible. Cavendish foods, a company centered mostly on potato products, will give them a potato and say, we want our fries out of this potato. Upon analyzing the starch content, crunch, cooking time and many other variables, Allen can present them with a good product similar to their desires. It also goes far beyond. They have every tool possible to make amazing products and break them down. They have scales that measure such minute amounts of ingredient that you can blow on them lightly and receive a measurement. They have homogenizers, winepods, UHT pasteurizers, centrifuges, dehydrators and a pile of other tools I've never seen in professional kitchens. It's a wild cross between a professional kitchen, which is the approach they take to begin with, and a science lab, producing an odd hybrid of extreme functionality. They even have a machine that tests the crunch of things. How do you test the crunch of things? Numerically I mean. It's a most impressive array of product. They are also highly into getting students from the culinary program involved. That way they get a labour base and the school gets a 4 million dollar facility with the ability to do absolutely anything at all. It is a phenomenal spot, and set up to do business with the big boys. Extremely impressive.