Expanding Your Culinary Creativity
The PolyScience Anti-Griddle is a essentially a -30°F cold plate that flash freezes creams, sauces, purees, yogurt, and other liquids and semi-solids. It’s an easy-to-use table top tool of 36.8 x 23.8 cm working surface ideal for adding further imagination to your menu or presentations. For example, the Ritz Carlton Sarasota in Florida uses the Anti-Griddle at receptions. Executive Chef Frederic Morineau says guests get a kick out of seeing a liquid transform into a solid right before their eyes.
Let your culinary imagination run wild!
Winner of The Food Network’s 2007 “Tasty Technology” award, this Grant Achatz inspired “cold cooktop” quickly freezes sauces and purees instead of heating them. Enabling you to create tantalizing textures and deliver new and extraordinarily satisfying dining experiences.
Simple-to-Master Techniques
Named the best of “tomorrow’s appliances for today’s kitchens” by The Food Network., The Anti-Griddle’s flat, ultra-cold work surface lends itself to three basic techniques:
- Freezing just the bottom surface of the item, leaving the top cool or at room temperature
- flipping the item over and freezing both the top and bottom, creating crunchy surfaces with a creamy center
- freezing everything solid.
Some chefs even use the Anti-Griddle to create layered dishes consisting of different foods, flavors, and textures. You can also use the Anti-Griddle to create freeform shapes, such as initials, by piping thick liquids onto its surface much as you would decorate a cake. With a little practice, you’ll be preparing all sorts of logos and shapes live or on demand – no reason not to keep your creations frozen (in a standard freezer) in advance.
Just how solid the food becomes depends on its freezing point, thickness, and how long you leave it on the freezing surface. For example, you can squeeze freshly made crème anglaise onto the Anti-Griddle, lay a stick in the thick cream and then turn it with a spatula to create a frozen crème anglaise lollipop with a still-creamy center. This takes in all about 2 minutes.
Combine with the exploration of other techniques
The Anti-Griddle is also ideal to flash freeze shapes of spherification liquids before they’re then plunged into alginate. Use a cookie cutter to standardize sizes before you soak them in alginate.
Gums can be quickly –instantaneously- set before freezing and therefore made into coating layers that will not melt immediately on reheating. They’ll provide a soft jelly coat in some cases sufficiently flexible and waterproof to hold liquids !
Very low temperature allows dipping semi frozen coatings into all sorts of dry scraps and bits that can be easily glued by gums, sugars, fat… Anything frozen can be immediately coated in chocolate or a fat or cold-gelling agent made coating : this includes foie gras (inside or outside), agar and carrageenan coatings, gellan and various elastic blends of gelling agents applied hot or at room temperature.
When combined with aerated products such as made with a cream whip the frozen textures will be crunchy or crackling.
At these low temperatures it’s child play to make popping candy stick onto almost anything : you have an embarrassing choice :chocolate, honey, maple syrup… the speed of freezing will even avoid wetting by the liquid fraction of whipped cream or even by low calorie –creamers !
Be the attraction at every event
Make your own lollipop demos at food shows are big hits. Instant lollipops and ice cream sandwiches on special occasions will be big customer attractions and stick in memories. A tip for caterers looking for that extra special je ne sais quoi.
Definitely a money maker for many small home catering services !
We highly recommend this equipment for all home chefs that don’t want to move heavy blast freezers around in their cars and don’t expect to find them where they are entertaining : Turn on the refrigerating stove and in 15 minutes you’re ready to serve memorable unique new dishes that reflect all your expertise in flavour pairing, texture building and chaud/froid food.
A must for trendy bars
More and more bars are finding this equipment a great add-on to their mixology expertise as it allows simultaneous preparation of many very cold shooters –a helpful trick- but also the making of fancy ice cubes and plate decorations that are unique and inspired by the present while the atmosphere of the event and the clients’ mood evolve.
Practical Tips
Prior to ‘firing up’ the Anti-Griddle, you might want to give the griddle surface a light coating of non-stick spray. Also, in some cases it might be more cautious to place some paper or film over the griddle to help remove frozen shapes.
For best results, use thicker liquids and stronger flavours. Thicker liquids give you more control over the final shape and texture (frozen solid or creamy inside); stronger flavors compensate for the numbing effect of cold on the taste buds.
Kalys stocks most of the thickeners and texturisers you can imagine (and probably some you don’t even know of): if looking for a special tip or answer to texture related questions for running the Anti-Griddle, don’t hesitate to drop a call or email us : we’ll be pleased to pick up your inquiry and forward it to our food lab !
Always use non-metal utensils to guarantee a long lasting scratch-free surface
Here are some examples of dishes created using the Anti-Griddle:
Lollipops
- Crème brûlée lollipops
- Frozen English pea lollipops
- Watermelon-tomato popsicle
Foam, solid mousse
- Sour cream balls with salmon and frozen fruit foam rolled in cheese
- Half frozen chocolate pudding with a thin layer of avocado, spicy candied walnuts and strawberries confited in a strawberry-red wine gastrique
- Frozen foamed sabayon floating in a sea of espresso
- Frozen Mexican hot chocolate foam, dusted with cinnamon and cocoa, served with a warm spicy chocolate sauce
- Frozen apricot foam star with a shot of frozen espresso
Mousse, soft
- Carbonated sorbet
Frozen Smoked mousse
- Applewood ice cream
Savoury dishes
- Bay scallops with Concord grape
- Frozen basil peppermint olive oil
- Semi-frozen vinaigrettes
- Whipped cauliflower with orange glace and ginger salt
Desserts, sweets
- Semi-frozen honey lozenge
- Lozenge of Concord grape puree
- Mango and sesame oil lozenge
- Sweetened frozen disk of chestnut puree with a divot to hold a pool of maple syrup
- Layers of frozen espresso, apricot, and cream semi-freddo
- Organic yogurt and strawberry canapés
- Mara des Bois with frozen yogurt
- Instant granita (Spray flavors on the anti-griddle and scrape to collect)
- Frozen lemon curd
