Although using your mouth may still be the most important part of being a chef, Dave Arnold, creator and director of the first Department of Culinary Technology at the French Culinary Institute, shared how he paired his love of food with technology to develop new cooking techniques.

Arnold spoke Wednesday as part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate Distinguished Lecture Series, sharing his innovative technologies and techniques in the culinary world.

Over the past two years there has been an incredible explosion of creativity in both the professional and culinary food world, Arnold said. Because of this expansion of creativity people who would not have necessarily gone into food in the past now are.

“My schtick is that I use new technologies and techniques in the service of making food and cocktails,” Arnold said. “The problem in doing this professionally is that it is extremely difficult because we can not prove that they are safe.”

Proving that their new technique or technology is safe is necessary for any developer and those in the culinary world will place little weight on techniques that have not been deemed safe, Arnold said.

However, this task can be extremely daunting for people who do not have a lot of resources.

“For the first time an open source model has been provided where anyone without a lot of money but a large amount of energy or passion can go and develop new technologies with a professional basis and have backing to say, ‘This is good,’” Arnold said.

Another difficulty that comes with developing new techniques for the culinary world is that the chef training does not line up as the same training one receives as someone who deals with food safety every day.

Arnold developed both types of skills independently. There was a situation in which he could use his ideas for technology to forward the improvements he was making in food.

“I was very lucky that it did not take long for me to realize that my love for technology and my love for food could come together,” Arnold said. “I never focused on making food different, just on improving technologies, like ‘How can I make my oven hotter?’”

However, now people are coming into the culinary world with the tendency to glom new techniques and ideas together before they develop their skills in the kitchen, Arnold said.

A chef must already have an understanding of the way a kitchen environment works revolving around food before trying to improve upon it.

“Cooking is still something that has to be done with your hands, with your brain, with your mouth,” Arnold said. “The most important thing to do for a young cook is eat a lot and cook a lot.”

One weakness in inexperienced chefs is their tendency to trust their intuitions, despite the fact they may be completely wrong, Arnold said.

An intuition that is completely wrong when it comes to low temperature cooking is that cooking has to do with time when its actually the relation between temperature and time, he said. Proteins and fats will not overcook as long as one does not go over a certain temperature.

One new technology to improve upon low temperature cooking are immersion circulators. Immersion circulators hold a liquid, which is usually water, at a very specific temperature. This temperature can be regulated within two-tenths of a degree.

“Most people are used to cooking with relatively inaccurate things and still have relatively good food,” Arnold said. “A person can cook very well with inaccurate temperature but there is a whole range of things that they can do once they have super high accuracy.”