The terms “soft condensed matter physics, biochemistry, and molecular biology” are not usually associated by the average person with “bread, cheese fondue, and the mystery of milky sambuca,’ but as Rachel Ehrenberg recently pointed out in Science News, they should be.
That’s because (and if you watch the Food Network, this won’t come as a surprise) the methods and knowledge of science are being increasingly enlisted to improve what comes out of chef’s kitchens.
“Molecular gastronomy” is a relatively new branch of science. But as one of its founding fathers, chef Hervé This of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris, points out in the Science News article, chemist Antoine Lavoisier experimented with the preparation of meat stock and physicist Benjamin Thompson invented a double boiler and a percolating coffeepot in way back in the late 1700s.
Still, in more recent years science’s main contribution to food preparation has been things like plastic-wrapped cheese slices and canned meat.
That began to change with an influential presentation by the late physicist Nicholas Kurti to the Royal Society of London in 1969. Kurti noted, “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.”
Kurti was the other founding father of molecular gastronomy. He and This named the field and organized its first formal conference in Erice, Italy, in 1992.
Molecular gastronomy seeks to apply the formalism of science to cooking. This, for example, has developed formulas for the various physical changes food undergoes in the kitchen. Molecular gastronomists can use these formulas to devise recipes no one has ever thought of before: for example, an eggless chocolate mousse recipe came out of This’s formula describing the transforming of cream into whipped cream.
Much of the challenge in cooking, Ehrenberg writes in Science News, is keeping complex mixtures from subsiding into a more comfortable, settled state. Old chocolate “blooms,” or turns white, because cocoa butter molecules shift into a more stable arrangement over time. Cheese fondues become lumpy because the caseins, or “curds,” in dairy products are naturally attracted to each other. Adding acidic wine to the mixture prevents this by surround the casein molecules with hydrogen ions, charging them so they repel each other. If the wine isn’t acidic enough, a bit of lemon juice can do the same thing–something you won’t find in most cheese fondue recipes, but another example of how understanding the science involved can improve cooking.
Of course, many mysteries remain. One Ehrenberg cites is the “ouzo effect.” Ouzo and other anise-flavored beverages such as sambuca consist of about 55 percent water, 45 percent alcohol, and a small amount of flavored oil. The proportion is just right so that the oil dissolves in the liquid, which thus, in the bottle, appears clear Add water in a cocktail, though, and the drink turns white–the oil is no longer soluble, and so forms droplets that scatter the light.
That seems obvious enough. What scientists don’t understand is why the milky state can remain stable for months. Why don’t the oil drops clump together and form a distinct layer within the drink? Research continues.
Researchers are also studying the experience of eating: how color and sound affect taste, how the ways our mouths deform and break down food affects our perception of it, and so forth.
As we learn more about this process, adventurous chefs are taking advantage of it to create new culinary delights, such as deconstructed white wine: bits of the individual flavor notes identified with white wine–for instance, vanilla, citrus, and fig–embedded in a wine-like gelatin. It’s wine you eat instead of drink.
For now, this kind of “molecular gastronomy” is being practiced mainly in the world’s fanciest restaurants. But give it time. After all, as sous chef Michael Turner points out in Ehrenberg’s article, everything is new at first. “I’m sure when the first person sautéed something people were like, ‘What the hell are you doing, you must be a witch.’”
Not all cooks like the term “molecular gastronomist”–but at least it sounds better than “witch.”
