(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Philip Preston is standing against a wall in the kitchen at the Aviary cocktail lounge in Chicago’s West Loop. Around him, the restaurant’s black-clad drinkmakers work with quiet intensity beneath operating-theater-bright lights, creating some of the country’s most innovative cocktails. A waiter rushes past, ferrying the In the Rocks, which appears to be nothing more than an orb of ice the size of a small fist nestled in a tumbler. With the drink, however, comes a slingshot designed to fit snugly over the rim of the glass. When a drinker snaps the elastic down against the sphere, the ice cracks and releases the cocktail held within, transforming the drink from In the Rocks to on the rocks.
Aviary’s general manager, Jeremiah Beckley, introduces Preston, 60, to the staff, who receive him with the deference typically granted a visiting dignitary. “It’s Hollywood light in the culinary world,” Preston says, laughing at the fuss being made. Dressed in khakis and a checked oxford shirt, pen in his breast pocket and phone in a holster attached to his belt, Preston has nothing Hollywood about him. And though he’s not a chef or critic, his fingerprints are on almost everything that leaves the kitchen here. It’s his lab-grade chillers that form the hollow frozen orbs at –17C (1.4F) and hold the drink separately at –15C, so it can be injected into the ice to order without melting everything before it reaches the table.
Preston is the president of PolyScience, a Chicago-area maker of precision temperature-control systems for industrial, laboratory, and medical equipment. About a dozen years ago, the company developed a subspecialty in innovative kitchen gear, beginning with the now ubiquitous immersion circulator. If you’ve been served a beef short rib that was spoon-tender but somehow still pink inside from edge to edge, or seen an egg dish on a brunch menu denoted by its cooking temperature (usually 63C), it was probably cooked with a PolyScience product. The technique is called sous vide, French for “under vacuum.” Ingredients are typically sealed in plastic bags and submerged in water, which the immersion circulator keeps heated to a precise temperature. As a result, overcooking is next to impossible. Set a steak to cook at a medium-rare 132F, and it will stay that way, even if you fall asleep while it’s cooking. Once employed almost exclusively in restaurants in France, immersion circulators can now be found in just about any moderately ambitious restaurant in America.
Preston is a relentless tinkerer and perfectionist—think Willy Wonka crossed with Bill Nye the Science Guy
The mania in the U.S. originated in 2005, when chef Matthias Merges reached out to Preston about acquiring one of the devices for Chicago’s Charlie Trotter, where Merges was then chef de cuisine. He was eager to experiment with sous vide, and Preston, an avid cook himself, gave him a few circulators for free. News travels quickly among elite chefs, and by the next year, Wylie Dufresne of New York’s (now closed) WD-50 was using PolyScience immersion circulators on an episode of the Food Network’s competitive-cooking show Iron Chef America. Demand grew exponentially from there, helped along by a vogue for sous vide cooking on the reality show Top Chef. To accommodate the increasing number of orders, PolyScience spun off a dedicated culinary division in 2010, which grew from about $500,000 in sales the first year to $8.5 million four years later. If you’re a curious home cook, you now have your choice of immersion circulators on Amazon.com, some of which go for as little as $70.
Preston, like many of the chefs who count him as a friend, is a relentless tinkerer and perfectionist—think Willy Wonka crossed with Bill Nye the Science Guy. He does most of his experimenting at his suburban Chicago home, in what he calls the Garage Mahal, a barnlike space that also holds his collection of meticulously restored cars and motorcycles, including a 1970 Ford Bronco and a 1964 Cadillac Eldorado. PolyScience Culinary prototypes and products are scattered around the room. A rotary evaporator, for instance, which distills at low temperatures and helps preserve delicate flavors and aromas, is at work on some apple eau de vie. “I was distilling some hard cider that I made,” Preston says, “and I thought, Well, I need to barrel-age it for three years to get good calvados,” a French apple brandy. Instead, he fills a plastic tub with the distillate, drops in a fistful of oak chips, and sets it on a shelf in the soundproof cabinet of a PolyScience Sonicprep, which uses high-powered ultrasonic waves to agitate and homogenize fluids. He inserts a wand into the liquid through a hole in the top of the cabinet, closes the door, and turns a knob. Behind an oval-shaped window, the oak shavings vibrate and blur, and the clear liquid turns amber, mimicking the absorption and expulsion cycle that happens in barrel aging. Moments later, there’s rough-and-ready calvados.
Preston’s father founded PolyScience in 1963 as an importer of scientific equipment. Gradually the company morphed into a manufacturer, and its laboratory business still accounted for about 80 percent of revenue, or about $38 million, in 2014. Preston took over the company in 1982, and before the sous vide moment, PolyScience’s greatest brush with notoriety was during the O.J. Simpson trial, when it developed the thermal cycling technology used in the DNA analysis of the infamous leather glove.
Australian appliance behemoth Breville Group Ltd. acquired PolyScience Culinary in 2014, and it wants to make their products as omnipresent in home kitchens as they are in professional ones. PolyScience’s first consumer product co-branded with Breville is called the Smoking Gun, designed to infuse foods quickly and easily with a nice wood-char flavor. It works and operates like a small blow-dryer, albeit one in which you’d light wood chips on fire, and you can find it at Crate & Barrel for $99.95. PolyScience’s classic model sous vide circulator, the one Preston gave Merges back in the day, goes for $1,200, but an at-home version can now be had at Sur La Table for $399.95. That puts it at the high end of a suddenly crowded market. PolyScience’s best known rival is probably Anova Applied Electronics Inc., which started as a $1.8 million Kickstarter project in 2013 and was recently acquired by Electrolux AB in a deal valued at up to $250 million.
If all Breville had wanted was to get into the home sous vide market, it could have developed a circulator in-house. What it got in PolyScience Culinary, says Breville USA President Damian Court, was a lucrative pathway into commercial kitchens. Chefs are tremendously loyal to the PolyScience brand—its Instagram account features an image of pastry chef Luis Villavelazquez, of San Francisco’s Les Elements Patisserie, displaying a “sous vide PolyScience” bicep tattoo. Having a direct line to chefs who are “pioneering new techniques that might have started out considered niche or eccentric,” Court says, can have benefits when, “years later, we’re looking at all of the trends to see what will be of interest to a consumer.”
Arguably no chef has worked more closely with Preston to pioneer those techniques and equipment than Grant Achatz, co-founder of the Alinea Group, which runs both the Aviary and the experimental cuisine pilgrimage site Alinea. The pair first worked together in 2005 on the Anti-Griddle, an ultra-chilled surface that will freeze anything (say, crème anglaise) almost instantly (bam—it’s ice cream). PolyScience products are all over the Aviary kitchen. At one station, a plume of spice-scented smoke wafts from a Smoking Gun loaded with allspice berries. At another, a chef pulls great alabaster sheaves of chicharrón, aka crackling fried pork skin, from pots of oil set on Control Freak induction cookers, which are capable of regulating their own temperatures down to the degree. With a price tag of $1,799.95, the cooker is aimed predominantly at the professional market, and yet its appeal to the home cook is apparent: Imagine being able to set a pan for “never-burn pancakes” or to treat a pot as a hyperaccurate slow cooker.
Achatz describes Preston as a kindred spirit. “At one point I asked him, ‘Philip, how do we make snow that tastes like pomegranate?’ ” Achatz laughs when he hears Preston is still working on it; one idea he had was to build a tall Plexiglas cylinder into which he blasts CO2 chilled to –109C. “I kid you not, it was 11 years ago when we first started talking about that,” Achatz says. “He’ll definitely figure it out. He doesn’t want to fail.” Even now, Preston is doing all the prototyping himself in his garage. “I can’t go to my team of engineers and say, ‘Hey, guys, let’s make snow!’ ” he says back at home. “The goofy stuff has to happen here.”
To contact the author of this story: Matthew Kronsberg in New York at matt.kronsberg@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net.
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