Molecular gastronomy

A classic example of molecular gastronomy is the investigation of the effect of specific temperatures on the yolk and white when cooking an egg. Many cookbooks provide the instructions of boiling eggs 3-6 minutes for soft yolks, 6-8 minutes for a medium yolk and so on. Molecular gastronomy reveals that the amount of time is less important than cooking the eggs to specific temperatures - which always yields the desired result.

Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking. It investigates the mechanisms behind the transformation of ingredients in cooking, attempts to explain them, and investigates the social, artistic and technical components of culinary and gastronomic phenomena in general (from a scientific point of view). The term was coined in 1988 by Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti and French chemist Hervé This.

Information revealed through the practice of molecular gastronomy research can be applied by cooks to improve their cooking, as it explains various reasons why things happen when cooking - for instance, why a soufflé rises. Knowing this information can enable a cook to create the optimum conditions for the rising of a soufflé, based on the science behind the transformation of the ingredients during cooking.

In addition to its use in explaining the "why" of how we already cook, molecular gastronomy also often reveals information that is helpful in creating new techniques, recipes and dishes. For example, cooks are often taught that water is the enemy of melted chocolate, causing it to clump when being tempered. Molecular gastronomy reveals that in fact given the proper ratio of water and chocolate one can produce a "chocolate mousse" without the need for any other ingredients.

Observations made through the scientific investigation of the social & artistic aspects of food & cooking (e.g. how the ways food is prepared and presented effects us), can be used by cooks to understand & enhance the enjoyment of food. Hervé This contends that, "If we are able to use the knowledge gained on food preparation, we might find new ways to make healthy food more attractive, we might persuade more people to cook better food and, last but not least, we might convince society to regard eating as a pleasure rather than a necessity."

This type of information is typical of molecular gastronomy, which seeks to dispel culinary myths handed down over generations and provide scientifically accurate information about the process of cooking, as well as provide information helpful in enhancing our enjoyment of food, cooking & eating.

Since molecular gastronomy investigates cooking, it involves cooking during its investigations. Though it is often mistakenly applied as a term to describe the food & cooking of chefs who embrace science, even though the food & cooking of a chef involves much more than science... it also involves skill, creativity, art, craft, nature, technology and tradition - to name but a few things.

Examples of Molecular Gastronomy

Example areas of investigation:

• How ingredients are changed by different cooking methods
• How all the senses play their own roles in our appreciation of food.
• The mechanisms of aroma release and the perception of taste and flavor
• How and why we evolved our particular taste and flavor sense organs and our general food likes and dislikes
• How cooking methods affect the eventual flavor and texture of food ingredients
• How new cooking methods might produce improved results of texture and flavor
• How our brains interpret the signals from all our senses to tell us the "flavor" of food?
• How our enjoyment of food is affected by other influences, our environment, our mood, how it is presented, who prepares it, etc.

Example myths proven incorrect:

• You need to add salt to water when cooking green vegetables
• Searing meat seals in the juices
• When making meringues you must separate the eggs and on no account get any egg yolk in the whites
• The cooking time for roast meat depends on the weight
• Adding oil to water while cooking pasta prevents the strands from sticking together
• When cooking stock you must start with cold water

Fundamental Objectives

The objectives of molecular gastronomy, as defined by This are:

Current Objectives:

Looking for the mechanisms of culinary transformations and processes (from a chemical and physical point of view) in three areas:

• 1. the social phenomena linked to culinary activity
• 2. the artistic component of culinary activity
• 3. the technical component of culinary activity

Original Objectives:

The original fundamental objectives of molecular gastronomy were defined by This in his doctoral dissertation as:

• 1. Investigating culinary and gastronomical proverbs, sayings, and old wives' tales
• 2. Exploring existing recipes
• 3. Introducing new tools, ingredients and methods into the kitchen
• 4. Inventing new dishes
• 5. Using molecular gastronomy to help the general public understand the contribution of science to society

However, This later recognized points 3, 4 and 5 as being not entirely scientific endeavours (more application of technology and educational), and has since revised the primary objectives of molecular gastronomy.

In 2006, This elaborated on the confusion the original objectives had caused in the media in an article for Nature.com entitled: "Food for tomorrow? How the scientific discipline of molecular gastronomy could change the way we eat"...

"First, I will define molecular gastronomy, because there is still much confusion in the media about the true meaning of this term, in part because of mistakes Nicholas Kurti and I made when we created the discipline in 1988. But I will start by distinguish between cooking and gastronomy: the first is the preparation of food, whereas the latter is the knowledge of whatever concerns man's nourishment. In essence, this does not concern food fashions or how to prepare luxury food—such as tournedos Rossini, canard à l'orange or lobster orientale—but rather an understanding of food; and for the more restricted 'molecular gastronomy', it is the chemistry and physics behind the preparation of any dish: for example, why a mayonnaise becomes firm or why a soufflé swells."

Nicholas Kurti and Hervé This

The Hungarian born physicist Nicholas Kurti (1908-1998) became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He was also visiting Professor at City College in New York, the University of California, Berkeley, and Amherst College in Massachusetts. His hobby was cooking, and he was an enthusiastic advocate of applying scientific knowledge to culinary problems. In 1969, held a presentation for the Royal Society of London entitled "The Physicist in the Kitchen" in which he is often quoted to have stated:

"I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés."

During the presentation Kurti demonstrated making meringue in a vacuum chamber, the cooking of sausages by connecting them across a car battery, the digestion of protein by fresh pineapple juice, and a reverse baked alaska - hot inside, cold outside - cooked in a microwave oven. Kurti was also an advocate of low temperature cooking, repeating 18th century experiments by the English scientist Benjamin Thompson by leaving a 2 kg lamb joint in an oven at 80 °C. After 8.5 hours, both the inside and outside temperature of the lamb joint were around 75 °C, and the meat was tender and juicy. Together with his wife, Giana Kurti, Nicholas Kurti edited an anthology on food and science by fellows and foreign members of the Royal Society, "But the crackling is superb".

Hervé This started collecting "culinary precisions" (old kitchen wives' tales and cooking tricks) in the early 1980s and started testing these precisions to see which ones held up; his collection now numbers some 25,000. He also has received a PhD in Molecular Gastronomy, served as an adviser to the French minister of education, lectured internationally, and was invited to join the lab of Nobel Prize winning molecular chemist Jean-Marie Lehn. This has published several books in French, two of which have been translated into English, including "Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor" and "Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking".

The idea of using techniques developed in chemistry to study food is not a new one, it dates back to 18th century, and the discipline of food science has existed for many many years. Kurti & This were colleagues and decided that a new, specific, discipline should be created within food science that investigated the processes in regular cooking (as food science was primarily concerned with the nutritional properties of food and developing methods to process food on an industrial scale).

When trying to decide on a name for this new discipline, the initial proposal was first "molecular gastronomy", but Kurti, being a physicist, insisted on adding "and physical", which is why the discipline was at first called "molecular and physical gastronomy" (this was also the title of This's doctoral dissertation). When Kurti died in 1998, This simplified the name to "molecular gastronomy", but Kurti's name was lent to the continuing series of workshops that Kurti and This had directed every two years in Erice, at the Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture.

International Meetings in Erice, Italy

File:Erice-bjs-3.jpg

An alley in Erice, Italy

Up until 2001, The International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy (IWMG) was named the "International School of Molecular and Physical Gastronomy" (ISMPG0). The first meeting was held in 1992 and the meetings have continued every few years there after until the most recent in 2004. Each meeting encompassed an overall theme broken down into multiple sessions over the course of a few days, including more than 12 sessions during the meeting in 2004.

The focus of the workshops each year were as follows:

• 1992 - First Meeting
• 1995 - Sauces, or dishes made from them
• 1997 - Heat in cooking
• 1999 - Food flavors - how to get them, how to distribute them, how to keep them
• 2001 - Textures of Food: How to create them?
• 2004 - Interactions of food and liquids

Examples of sessions within these meetings have included:

• Chemical Reactions in Cooking
• Heat Conduction, Convection and Transfer
• Physical aspects of food/liquid interaction
• When liquid meets food at low temperature
• Solubility problems, dispersion, texture/flavour relationship.
• Stability of flavour

Adoption and Repudiation of the Term

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the term started to be used to describe a new style of cooking in which some chefs began to explore new possibilities in the kitchen by embracing science, research, technological advances in equipment & various natural gums and hydrocolloids produced by the commercial food processing industry. It has since been used to describe the food & cooking of a number of famous chefs including Pierre Gagnaire, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, Homaro Cantu, Wylie Dufresne and Grant Achatz, some of which have set up their own research facilities, such as El Bulli Taller , in which to explore these possibilities.

Some of these chefs had connections to or directly collaborated with Hervé This, which may have contributed - in part - to the mis-application of the term "molecular gastronomy" to their food & cooking. For instance, Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire are collaborators and publish the products of their collaboration on Gagnaire's website. As well, El Bulli and The Fat Duck are listed as partners in the EU funded European Research Project INICON, a project for the sustainable collaboration between chefs, science and the food industry for the modernization of cooking. The INICON project publishes a manual on molecular gastronomy co-authored by Hervé This, and generally uses molecular gastronomy as the term to refer to the work of the organization throughout its website.

Heston Blumenthal was once a Hervé This collaborator, publishing This's recipe for "Chocolate Chantilly" in his first installment of recipe writing for the UK newspaper The Guardian in 2001, followed by an account of his visit to This's laboratory in France in 2002 during which they developed a recipe for fondant containing egg whites instead of yolks and no sugar. Blumenthal, at one time, adopted the term molecular gastronomy to describe some of the research going on at his restaurant, The Fat Duck. He was also a participant in 2001 & 2004 International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy in Erice. The 2001 meeting being where he met many of the scientists he works with today.

Noted kitchen science writer Harold McGee has "known Hervé This for over a decade". Over those years, he has been a regular attendee of the molecular gastronomy meetings in Erice. He at one time defined molecular gastronomy as "the scientific study of deliciousness" in a contribution to the 2004 KVL Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy, in which he also proposed areas of focus for a university program in molecular gastronomy. Harold's book, On Food & Cooking, mentions molecular gastronomy on pages 2 & 3 of the introduction.

Ferran Adria notes in a document published in the 2003 history section of the El Bulli website entitled "About Molecular Cuisine" that up until 2003 his contact with the scientific world had been "sporadic". He goes on to explain that this is why he had "never ascribed to any scientific origin of their (El Bulli's) creations" until his scientific collaborations in 2003. He notes that he had known Harold McGee and Hervé This through conferences since 2000. In a 2004 online Q&A, he made a distinction between his work and molecular gastronomy and went on to comment on the potential longevity of what he saw as a molecular gastronomy "movement":

"I don’t understand the characterization of molecular gastronomy as a type of cuisine. It’s happening the same that happened years ago with fusion, it’s becoming a common place. There isn’t a molecular cuisine. There’s a molecular movement, the molecular gastronomy, where some scientists cooperate with the world of cooking. Clearly, the move acts upon cooking, but I don’t think it’s a cuisine per se.

In twenty years, we could look back and see how many new techniques, more than concepts, were introduced thanks to this movement. Having said this, whoever says that this movement doesn’t have a future, only has to pick up a phone, turn on the TV or log-in the internet. Science has changed the world."

Perhaps frustrated with the common mis-classification of their food & cooking as "molecular gastronomy", several chefs often associated with the movement have since repudiated the term, releasing a joint statement in 2006 clarifying their approach to cooking. Other modern chefs have embraced Hervé This. An organization known as "The Experimental Cuisine Collective" in New York which holds monthly workshops at which This has been a featured speaker and who's website lists works by This on the resources page has members including some of the most well known chefs in the city.

While some chefs do, in fact, engage in the scientific investigation of cooking - this would only represent a fraction of their work. Just as the work of an architect may involve building scale models... "building scale models" does not accurately describe the work of an architect, as there is much more involved. The application of the term "molecular gastronomy" to describe the entirety of a given chef's work is no less inaccurate, regardless their engagement in the scientific investigation of cooking (molecular gastronomy) to whatever degree.

Despite the best efforts of many to distinguish the scientific investigation of processes in cooking (molecular gastronomy) from the creative use of recently available information, technology and ingredients by chefs to produce non-traditional dishes in non-traditional forms, textures & flavor combinations (e.g. "New Cuisine", "Progressive Cuisine", "Nueva Cocina", "Culinary Constructivism", "Modern Cuisine", "Avant-Garde Cuisine" etc...). Molecular gastronomy continues to be used, in many cases, as a blanket term to refer to any and all of these things - particularly in the media. As well, the terms "Molecular Cuisine" and "Molecular cooking" have been derived from the term and used by some to describe food & cooking produced with information, tools & ingredients associated with science or food science in general.

Chefs often associated with molecular gastronomy because of their embrace of science include: Pierre Gagnaire, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, Homaro Cantu, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz, Sat Bains, Sean Wilkinson, Richard Blais, Kevin Sousa /Atlanta, Sean Brock, Marc Lepine /Ottawa, Will Goldfarb/NYC

Other interpretations of the term

• "The application of scientific principles to the understanding and improvement of domestic and gastronomic food preparation." - Peter Barham
• "The art and science of choosing, preparing and eating good food." - Thorvald Pedersen
• "The scientific study of deliciousness" - Harold McGee
• Combining the 'know how' of cooks with the 'know why' of scientists

Precursors to Molecular Gastronomy

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753 - 1814) was one of the early pioneers in the science of food & cooking.

In the second century BC, the anonymous author of a papyrus kept in London used a balance to determine whether fermented meat was lighter than fresh meat. Since then, many scientists have been interested in food and cooking. In particular, the preparation of meat stock—the aqueous solution obtained by thermal processing of animal tissues in water—has been of great interest. It was first mentioned in the fourth century BC by Apicius (André (ed), 1987), and recipes for stock preparation appear in classic texts (La Varenne, 1651; Menon, 1756; Carême & Plumerey, 1981) and most French culinary books. Chemists have been interested in meat stock preparation and, more generally, food preparation since the eighteenth century (Lémery, 1705; Geoffrey le Cadet, 1733; Cadet de Vaux, 1818; Darcet, 1830). Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is perhaps the most famous among them—in 1783, he studied the processes of stock preparation by measuring density to evaluate quality (Lavoisier, 1783). In reporting the results of his experiments, Lavoisier wrote, "Whenever one considers the most familiar objects, the simplest things, it's impossible not to be surprised to see how our ideas are vague and uncertain, and how, as a consequence, it is important to fix them by experiments and facts" (author's translation). Of course, Justus von Liebig should not be forgotten in the history of culinary science (von Liebig, 1852) and stock was not his only concern. Another important figure was Benjamin Thompson, later knighted Count Rumford, who studied culinary transformations and made many proposals and inventions to improve them, for example by inventing a special coffee pot for better brewing. There are too many scientists who have contributed to the science of food preparation to list here. - Hervé This, 2006

The concept of molecular gastronomy was perhaps presaged by Marie-Antoine Carême, one of the most famous French chefs, who said in the early 19th century that when making a food stock "the broth must come to a boil very slowly, otherwise the albumin coagulates, hardens; the water, not having time to penetrate the meat, prevents the gelatinous part of the osmazome from detaching itself." The observation is valuable, although the concept of a unique soluble "osmazome" providing flavour is today not considered valid.

See also

• Ferran Adrià
• Grant Achatz
• Wylie Dufresne
• Peter Barham
• Heston Blumenthal
• Alton Brown
• Shirley Corriher
• Harold McGee
• Don Mottram
• Russ Parsons
• Robert Wolke

References

• Hervé This, Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking. Columbia University Press, New York, 2007 ISBN 978-0231141703
• Hervé This, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. Columbia University Press, New York, 2006. ISBN 978-0231133128
• Hervé This, Pierre Gagnaire: La cuisine c'est de l'amour, de l'art, de la technique (2006, 309p) ISBN 2738116787
• Hervé This: Casseroles et éprouvettes (2002, 239p) ISBN 2842450396
• Hervé This: Traité élémentaire de cuisine (2002, 237p) ISBN 2701133033
• Hervé This: La casserole des enfants (1998, 127p) ISBN 2701123097
• Hervé This: Révélations gastronomiques (1995) ISBN 2701117569
• Hervé This: Les Secrets de la cassrole (1993, 222 p) ISBN 270111585X
• Nicholas Kurti: Chemistry and Physics in the Kitchen, April 1994, Scientific American Magazine
• Nicholas Kurti: But the Crackling Is Superb, Institute of Physics Publishing, 1998 ISBN 978-0852743010
• Harold McGee, The Curious Cook. North Point Press, Berkeley, 1990.
• Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Scribner, New York, 2004. ISBN 0-684-80001-2.
• Statement on the 'new cookery' Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Harold McGee; The Observer, London, Sunday December 10, 2006

External links

• The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula - Wired Magazine 2007
• Experimental Cuisine Collective
• April 1994 Issue of Scientific American Magazine - Article Chemistry and Physics in the Kitchen by Nicholas Kurti
• JULABO Heating Immersion Circulator for Sous Vide
• About Molecular Cuisine by Ferran Adria
• eGullet Q&A with Harold McGee
• eGullet Q&A with Heston Blumenthal
• Curious Cook
• khymos.org - a website dedicated to molecular gastronomy
• Achewood, 26 January 2007 - Molecular gastronomy in popular culture
• Essay by Hervé This
• http://godsofalchemy.blogspot.com/