Foam

Am I the only one who doesn't like the foam gracing every dish in high end restaurants these days? Damn that Ferrán Adria whose influence has led top chefs all over the world to create foams of just about everything they can think of. Give me a well-made sauce instead. I don't even like the foam on a cappuccino. I'd much rather have a latte or café au lait, which has a lower foamy profile. Foam just doesn't have a nice mouth feel--it's something you wait to go away, like the foam on soda or champagne. Pretty while it lasts, but let's get rid of it!

And yet I've been noticing this phenomenon more and more recently. I was at Eleven Madison Park yesterday for lunch (lovely, lovely, lovely!), and several of the dishes that came to our table had a foam component. One of my dining companions ordered the velouté of parsnip and green apples and Hawaiian prawns. The appetizer came out with a giant pile of green foam on top--ostensibly foam of green apples. The prawns were buried at the bottom. I just wanted to scrape it off the top for him. I had a delicious slow cooked Scottish salmon (too bad it was farmed) with a horseradish crust, Kohlrabi (I had to look it up, too), and Riesling sauce. But it was not really a sauce, but a foam! I know they're going for a certain light texture, but I feel that the dish loses something with all of these dissipating bubbles.