Culinary trompe-l'oeil: A new concept in coating

In the course of any creative innovation, the visual connection is a constant that, even unconsciously, influences the work. The present paper reveals the development of formulas and recipes that arise in order to realize what, in principle, is no more than an exercise in visual replication of a product that is foreign to a given culture. After the execution of this imitation, with hindsight one perceives a culinary object that is literally an edible stone—all this by means of various stages of games of perception that seem to alternate between mineral and vegetable.The point of departure for such a strategy was our initial research in formulating edible coatings. This in turn led to a culinary formula for replicating a tunta or Andean potato. The technical development of this new culinary object, here serves as a test case for the theoretical basis of this paper. To the extent that the process of this development to its culmination successfully achieves the imitation of an Andean potato, this process reveals a new culinary category that creates an object that retains the same sensory qualities of the potato, but with the outward aspect of a stone gathered from a river bed—to this end, the process modifies the composition of the coating by incorporating various colorings.On the one hand, the aim is to imitate an ingredient that is inherently edible; on the other, the idea is to surpass that imitation by investing the ingredient with apparent qualities of objects not fit for human consumption: river stones. The experiment focusses primarily on the development of a mixture of kaolin and lactose dissolved in water. The application of a formula that mainly comprises these elements opens the possibility to transcend the basic trompe l'oeil exercise in illusion with a new idea of food coating. That is to say that the coating does not merely transform the appearance of the product; but also, in a manner that coincides with the completion of cooking, retains the humidity of its content. It is also a fact that, at the same time, it manifests one of the few cases of retaining a crunchy surface while hot—since it is rare in any traditional recipe that crunchiness and humidity could be compatible with such a texture.