Photo Credit: MONA/Remi Chauvin
Jessica recently went down to Hobart for the MONA FOMA festival, taking her dictaphone with her. We’ll be bringing you her dispatches over the next few weeks.
Any major arts festival is, I think, invisibly glued together by food. In the case of a visiting writer, dashing from show to show, it’s usually the same pattern: a cup of coffee grabbed on the fly; a handbag full of sesame bars and Tic Tacs; something hot and greasy late at night, when the last performance has run over and everything bar the kebab shop is closed. Perhaps realising this, MONA FOMA has put woven food throughout the programme—experimentally, at the inaugural MOMA market, and more successfully in its lunchtime cooking demonstrations.
Though the MOMA market is a lovely idea—a row of stalls on the museum’s rooftop tennis court, where local and organic bakers, farmers and apiarists can hawk their wares—it’s hampered by the fact that the whole thing is in danger of blowing away. The sea winds are more than brisk, and a sample of Tasmanian honey ends up mostly in my hair. I have better luck with a lemon-basil ice cream, eaten back to the wind. It’s delicious.
The cooking demonstrations, safely ensconced in the festival’s unofficial hub, PW1, draw a much larger crowd than I’d anticipated. I have to jostle a bit to catch a glimpse of MONA’s executive chef, Phillipe Leban, and his sous chef Vince Trim, as they gleefully dunk things in liquid nitrogen.
The first course comprises of ‘Dragon’s Breath’, small frozen fruit clusters held together with sugar syrup and dunked for a few seconds into the nitrogen. It retains, more or less, the taste and texture of frozen berries, and I suspect it’s a dish more valued for its stagecraft than its taste. Audience member after audience member comes forward, looking a little suspiciously at the food Leban places in their hands. “Oh, this is weird,” says the woman next to me, taking a tentative bite. Smoke pours out of her nose—like a dragon, or a teenage smoker.
Nitrogen plays more of an integral role in the stout sorbet that Trim whisks together. Though alcohol won’t freeze at kitchen-freezer temperatures, the nitrogen, at -196C, transforms the stout into a tremendously smooth ice cream, with none of the sugar or ice crystals that are at risk of forming at higher temperatures. It pretty faithfully replicates the taste of stout—almost pure yeast, with a sugary back-end. I take a bite for journalism’s sake, and dispose of the rest discreetly.
I’m more taken with the chocolate fondants, comprised of nothing more than chocolate, cream, and a little carbon dioxide. Pressurised into balls and immersed in the nitrogen for ten seconds or so—“It’s not instantaneous, like you see in the movies”—the fondants form a crackly, ‘cooked’ outer layer, that gives way to a room-temperature chocolate mousse. The purity of ingredients is important; if you add egg, as to a traditional fondant, the entire thing is liable to explode.
Nothing explodes, but the demonstration doesn’t go off without a hitch. As the stores of nitrogen rapidly deplete, Leban accidentally sprays the audience with pressurised chocolate. Nobody seems to mind too much. It makes a nice change from sesame bars.
