I’m Dalton, and I work as a natural language data scientist for a startup. While I do love data and my work, I truly love music, board games, cooking, and many other things. In the past couple years, I’ve been putting more effort into my cooking. Trying to hone the core techniques and learn new ones, understand flavor combinations, and appreciate ingredients. This site is mostly to help me track my own thoughts and keep my memory in line. I do keep a hand-written cooking journal, but something like this that has the potential (real or not) to be viewed by another person will help motivate me to be more consistent with both cooking and documenting my efforts.

My earliest memories cooking are with my grandmother when I was probably between the ages of four and six. She’d often make the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the Hershey’s chocolate chip bag and set me on a chair to “help”. Eventually, I graduated to helping with breakfast. Things like waffles or biscuits and gravy, where I learned how to make a proper roux. I did some cooking growing up, but didn’t get a chance to explore more until I spent my junior year of college in London in my first flat that had a kitchen.

In London, I watched Julia Child’s The French Chef on Amazon and SortedFood on YouTube. Eventually, I found videos of chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal and began to observe the techniques and ideas of all sorts of other chefs. For the couple years that followed my return to Minneapolis, I haphazardly tried my hand at all sorts of dishes, more often following recipes. It wasn’t until I saw the Grant Achatz episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table that I felt truly inspired by what food could be.

The way Grant spoke about food and memory and the power to make the dining experience fun by handing people a helium filled sugar balloon struck something deep inside of me. It was also my first exposure to “molecular gastronomy” and more modern, scientific techniques in cooking. I was so inspired my parents gifted me a copy of Modern Cuisine at Home and I purchased a sous vide, a vacuum sealer, a whipping siphon, and the chemicals for spherification.

In the time since, I have worked on a number of techniques and recently branched into developing my own recipes and ad hoc-ing more complex dishes for dinner. My library has expanded to include a couple culinary textbooks, reference books, the Alinea and elBulli 2005-2011 cookbooks. And I am always thinking about the next dish to try and replicate or flavor combination I want to try.

Above are some of the dishes I have made in the past couple months! The first is an improvised dinner I made the night my partner and I went to a dance performance. It consisted of herb coated roasted rack of lamb, confit potatoes, onion gel, thyme, and sautéed morels. The second is my first recipe from the elBulli cookbook: the margarita frappé with salt air. The third is my second Alinea dish that I made to celebrate 5 months with my partner on NYE. It is pork tenderloin, puffed pork shoulder, cornbread purée, sage fluid gel, grapefruit supremes, and honey. The last dish is the first one that I developed. The “egg” is a passionfruit and mango purée sphere on a vanilla cream gel served with lemon almond toast.

My (loose) idea for this site is to have a collection of posts chronicling my attempt to make every dish on the 2007 elBulli menu over the course of the year. Ideally, I’d like to try and make the entire menu sometime in November or December, but we’ll see how feasible it is for my partner and I to make and serve 36 dishes to eight people in our apartment. I will also write about the dishes I am developing and dinners I improvise. Ideally, I will be writing, and therefore cooking, at least one involved dish or meal per week.

Things are likely to change as my ideas and intent for this site develop as the projects roll on.