Food Science

Forgive me if you haven’t eaten, it’s time for a meal-time thought experiment.
By Claire L. Evans

Imagine, please, that you have just finished a complicated, surprising, and resoundingly flavorful meal, one with multiple courses and interludes, petit fours and consommés. The soft-boiled eggs were perfectly cooked, the wine excellent, and each course fed into the other with elegance and ease. You’re sitting back in your chair, belt unbuckled, absorbing all of the flavors that have crossed your palate in the last few hours. Your dining companion, who is as immersed in this culinary reverie as you are, turns to you and says, emphatically, “What a meal! This chef is a pure scientist.” Would you disagree?

Normally, we associate haute cuisine with a certain level of artistry, and although it’s true that cooking can sometimes be a science of measurements and temperatures, it’s usually safe to say that a good meal is a lot more like an epic poem than a lab report. We often say of dedicated foodies that they “love life,” with a passion far removed from the world white coats and Bunsen burners. Yet, despite the fact most of us haphazardly toss our salads and season our entrees with an uncertain dash of condiments, many gastronomes are beginning to take their work to a new level of – wouldn’t you have it – scientific precision.

Ok, so “scientific” food sounds unappetizing. I remember dissecting a small squid in middle-school biology class: my teacher took the leftovers and deep-fried them for the class. I think it was the first time I ever ate calamari, and it’s put me off the stuff for a lifetime. Still, it’s not all like that.

Nicholas Kurti, the Hungarian physicist who first proposed the notion of “food science,” (later referred to as “molecular gastronomy”) justified this egregious intrusion of physics into the kitchen by saying, “I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can add and measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.” Kurti, along with a French physical chemist named Hervé This, pioneered the use of chemistry – rather than the hodge-podge of emotion and empiricism that usually prevails over a hot stove – as a tool to enhance culinary creations. Among other notable advances, Kurti and This discovered the perfect temperature for cooking an egg (65 degrees Celsius), used an electrical field to broil salmon, and found that adding a little cold water to egg whites produces an entire cubic meter more of foam in the beating process.

Ever since these early kitchen experiments – Kurti and This were mostly interested in proving the scientific validity of old wives’ tales, as well as in exploring the chemical properties of foods as they heat, mix, spread, and soufflé – adventurous chefs around the world have taken the notion of molecular gastronomy to a three-star level. Most famous is perhaps the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, whose exclusive mountain-top El Bulli, in Costa Brava, is considered to be the best restaurant in the Western world. In a form that suits the restaurant’s legendary status, it is closed half of the year so that Adrià and his team can work in their Barcelona food lab, and is always booked over a year in advance.

A typical El Bulli experience involves at least 27 courses, all of which are bite-size and completely surprising: airy balls of savory carrot foam, ribbons of candied beet, truffles cooked in liquid nitrogen, freeze-dried foie gras, miniature almond and garlic ice-cream cones, spoonfuls of parmesan cheese marshmallows, melon caviar, and something called “rose air,” are all standard fare at this restaurant, which, incidentally, claims to have invented “frozen savory” food. Adrià also invented a “spherification” process, which, using controlled jellification of a liquid submerged in a Calcic bath, allows him to make soft spheres out of almost anything – namely, gnocchi, caviar, and eggs.

While the resident genius of El Bulli is as much a physicist as he is a chef, and the restaurant has a laboratory, not a kitchen, its output is, allegedly, some of the most subtle and startling-tasting food in the world. Perhaps science and the kitchen needn’t be as separate as we imagine them to be.