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What is molecular gastronomy?
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You are having dinner in one of the finest restaurants in the world, and you're expecting less meat and two veggies and something more along the lines of an abstract painting made up lines of tomato sauce and the remnants of a Munchkin's picnic.
But what you get is altogether different.
You have to eat the whisky cola because it's a snow cone topped with foam. The caviar tastes like peaches and goes surprisingly well with the oysters. The spaghetti that's actually courgettes made into noodles and your salmon is poached with liquorice, yet it's delicious.
Did I mention that the menu is edible as well? It's not so much a meal as a trip to Wonderland with the Mad Hatter as the sous chef.
It's not magic, and it's not madness. It's molecular gastronomy.
But whatever you call it, molecular gastronomy is not an expensive restaurant fad like nouveau cuisine that will be forgotten tomorrow. It is a true revolution in food because it takes cooking into the laboratory to discover exactly how it works and then takes those discoveries back into the kitchen to create art.
Behind all the snail porridge and sardine sorbet, molecular gastronomy is the mixing of cuisine and science so you can understand how the physical and chemical processes of cooking work.. If you understand why a seared steak tasted better than a microwaved one, why two liquids like eggs and oil can produce a semi-solid-like mayonnaise, or how ice crystals affect the texture of ice cream, you're halfway to bits of kitchen magic that would make Escoffier sit up in his grave with interest. This lets five-star eateries like Fat Duck or Moto create curiosities like edible sand or literally cooking with laser beams, yet it also gives us the Chicken McNugget and debunks some culinary old wives tales while showing home cooks how to make better French fries or the best ice cream in the world using a dash of liquid nitrogen.
Yet is it all tricks and retorts? Not quite. Hervé This, one of the pioneers of the molecular gastronomy, once said this about a food:
If you have a poor sandwich with very good friends, it's always good. And a very good meal with awful people, it is not good.
In other words, after all the lasers and atomic pesto, the most important ingredient is still love.
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