what does DECONSTRUCTED mean? - Page 3

lol if serving a topping on a fancy cracker is deconstruction then ive been doing this since i was about 4 my mom tought me heres the recipe

1    saltine cracker

1    tsp peanut butter

1/2 tsp jelly (i like grape)

spread peanut butter on cracker then aply jelly you can add as little or as much as you want of either pb or j ..... i have anothe one with cheese and mustard but im saving that for next top chef .....  i really thought there was more to it but its ok i hope someone thinks of this the next time they watch some fancy cooking show.... or better yet does anyone have a recipe for deconstructed meat loaf with bread?

All well and good . Now let me see yo take apart the penut butter, cracker, and grape jelly . Break them each down from their  now state,  to their seperate  complex chemical components. .

I'm sure HouseHusband had his tongue in his cheek, Ed. But I'm just as sure he, and others, can be greatly confused if they watch cooking shows on TV. More times than not the celebrity chefs use "deconstruction" incorrectly. So most folks who watch them can easily believe that all it means is that you separate the ingredients and lay them out on a plate, rather than group them together in the usual fashion.

The way the technique is commonly used, HouseHusband doesn't have to break them down to chemical components. All he need do is take a strangely shaped plate (perhaps a half-moon). Put a dollop of peanut butter at one end, pile up some crackers (ideally, broken in smaller pieces) in the middle, and paint some grape jelly at the other end. Voila! Deconstructed PB&J.

And then the judges (if it's something like Chopped) can argue whether using smooth or chunky peanut butter makes a difference.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chefedb 

All well and good . Now let me see yo take apart the penut butter, cracker, and grape jelly . Break them each down from their  now state,  to their seperate  complex chemical components. .

i apologize for not quoting  originally but this was in reference to the the "deconstructed sunday" earlyer in the thread. im certainly not Trying to discredit your "art" 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by KYHeirloomer 
The way the technique is commonly used, HouseHusband doesn't have to break them down to chemical components. All he need do is take a strangely shaped plate (perhaps a half-moon). Put a dollop of peanut butter at one end, pile up some crackers (ideally, broken in smaller pieces) in the middle, and paint some grape jelly at the other end. Voila! Deconstructed PB&J.

 

Yeah, ky, you got it there, you "paint" the jelly on the dish. 

Never enough to satisfy!  Never on TOP of whatever it is supposed to add flavor to!
 

So...

Quote:

Originally Posted by house husband 

lol if serving a topping on a fancy cracker is deconstruction then ive been doing this since i was about 4 my mom tought me heres the recipe

 

 

1    saltine cracker

1    tsp peanut butter

1/2 tsp jelly (i like grape)

 

spread peanut butter on cracker then aply jelly you can add as little or as much as you want of either pb or j ..... i have anothe one with cheese and mustard but im saving that for next top chef .....  i really thought there was more to it but its ok i hope someone thinks of this the next time they watch some fancy cooking show.... or better yet does anyone have a recipe for deconstructed meat loaf with bread?

See, my question here -- recognizing that your tongue is pretty deeply in your cheek, after all -- would be why and in what context you're doing this. I'm fooling around, but also perfectly serious.

If the point is "ta da! deconstruction!" the way most of the hacks who throw the term around use it, you are dead right: your deconstructed PB&J is precisely like theirs. You have one major advantage over them, though, in that you are using the device to prick the pretentious balloon in question.

But could we imagine a situation in which this could actually be serious cuisine?

Suppose we decided to play with the idea of "comfort food," which seems to mesmerize Americans these days. Basically "comfort food" means the stuff we associate with Mom, childhood, whatever, right? Okay, so PB&J would have to be in there. So it seems to me that one dimension of the challenge of thinking this way would be to make the diner think, "what's so comforting about this? Why do I even like it?" I mean, is it the fat content, or the bland flavors, or the low level of work, or what? Now in that context, I could imagine taking your recipe and framing it to drive toward extremes, basically setting the diner up to have to make and eat his own PB&J with knife and fork. Essentially you'd shift the contextual situation so radically that it feels weird to just pick the thing up and bite into it. So is it still PB&J if you have to use finicky utensils and a really overwrought process to eat it?

It'd be very hard to pull off, and it would depend on a whole meal context, but I could see that working. It's tricky stuff.

My first peanut butter and jelly sandwich was in kindergarten when normally we left school at noon to go home and eat, but this time there was some show or something where the parents were invited, and we were given lunch.  Lunch was a large box of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches delivered to the room, and they had been sitting one on top of the other so that the ones on the bottom were completely squished. 

I loved that sandwich.  I can still taste it.  I was used to our Italian type sandwiches, old dry rolls with prosciutto that was hard to bite, or capocollo, or salame, or slices of italian bread with the crust that but into your gums - hardly what a 5-year-old likes.  Soft bread, and squished down, too, with the peanut butter dense with the jelly.  I can still feel the bite of it.  I had never had it before.  My mother scorned every element of it - soft bread, peanut butter, grape jelly. 

Now, Chris, do you mean that deconstructed means to figure out just what it was of that experience i liked and to eliminate the unnecessary elements, and/or to try to figure out what are unnecessary to it, and what is necessary?

The bite of it was important

the smell of peanutbutter, the absence of any need to chew hard or pull on fibers of meat.

jam without any seeds or skins, cool sweetness without any distractions between the teeth.

The soft squashed nature of the bread. 

the biting through of layers. 

the accompanying milk, in cartons, sipped through a straw

So, say, i could make a stacked pile of layers of soft bready stuff (i'm thinking like a dobostorte, where each layer is only 1/4 cm thick, but it would have to be salty and only a hint of sweet, and preferably yeasted) - or the bread could be pressed down just right -  with many alternate layers of softness and sparkling transparent cool, fruity sweetness.  It could be cut into bite sized pieces of interesting kid-like shapes (star, cube, circle) and eaten with a toothpick or with the fingers (no fork and knife which is the antithesis of comfort food).  It could have similar shaped little boxes of milk with straws, one gulp-doses.  These could be piled up with the blocks of pbj.

Would that be deconstructing my architypical peanut butter and jelly sandwich? 

Well, it means to take something apart (deconstruction) and analyze it.  So in food, you would be breaking down a particular recipe and then assembling it back together in such a way that the re-arrangement of its' constituent elements indicates your analysis and interpretation of that particular dish and usually ends up looking very unique and different form the original creation...

Quote:

Originally Posted by sarahg 

Well, it means to take something apart (deconstruction) and analyze it.  So in food, you would be breaking down a particular recipe and then assembling it back together in such a way that the re-arrangement of its' constituent elements indicates your analysis and interpretation of that particular dish and usually ends up looking very unique and different form the original creation...

Isn't that two steps, deconstruction and then reconstruction? Or maybe re-creation?
 

Sure it is, but that's what it actually entails :)