Chef Wylie Dufresne & Meat Glue

This past Monday I had the pleasure of attending one of the Science and Cooking Lecture series at Harvard. The featured speaker was Chef Wylie Dufresne of wd~50 in NYC and his lecture was entitled "Meat Glue Mania".

Transglutaminase, a.k.a. meat glue, was the star of the lecture, an enzyme that opens up a world of possibilities to individuals who are one part chef and one part mad scientist.

Though you wouldn't know it, meat glue has been applied to the delicious looking dish above: Wagyu flap steak, barley, malt, turnip.

Flap steak is typically reserved for fajitas and other applications for flat cuts of meat. With the meat glue, he's able to stick together multiple flap steaks, and after its been bound together in plastic wrap in a cylindrical shape and set over night, you can recut the meat and get a nice sear on the outside of the meat yet retain a medium rare center.

What's more amazing is that they're finding non-meat applications, as is with the barley cake accompaniment above, and wd~50 is currently experimenting with gluing together vegetables. All in all, a truly fun and inspiring lecture.

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