What’s cookin’: science is in the kitchen, and the results are good for our taste buds
Science News, March 29, 2008 by Rachel Ehrenberg
At minibar, a six-seat restaurant within the Cafe Atlantico in Washington, D.C., many menu items sound familiar: Philly cheese steak, conch fritters, corn on the cob, and mojitos. But the mojito doesn’t come in a glass. It is served as a bite-sized sphere on a spoon. Calcium chloride is mixed with the traditional rum, lime, mint, and sugar. A dollop of this concoction is dropped into a bath of water and sodium alginate, a gum extracted from algae–which encloses the orb of flavor in a membrane. After a minute, it is rinsed with water to stop the gelling, transferred to a canister, then charged with carbon dioxide. A few hours later, the sphere is slightly carbonated, built to flood the taste buds in a fizzing burst of flavor.
Today, it would not be unusual to find alginate, liquid nitrogen, or lecithin in the larders of top-ranked chefs, like Jose Andres of Cafe Atlantico, Ferran Adria from elBulli in Roses, Spain, or Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in Bray, England.
Cooks are drawing inspiration from the lab, delighting in techniques that once were the province of industry. At the same time, researchers are zealously scrutinizing food. By zeroing in on its creation in the kitchen–and destruction in the body–scientists are joining chefs in cracking the code of delicious. Some chefs react to this new cuisine by declaring it “not real cooking.” But minibar sous chef Michael Turner disagrees. “Everything is new at first;’ says Turner. “I’m sure when the first person sauteed something people were like, ‘What the hell are you doing, you must be a witch.’”
The traditional relationship between science and food might be described as an assault, fielding Spare, plastic-wrapped cheese products, and TV dinners. “Food science,” driven by the needs of industry, has been geared toward the mass production of “foodstuffs.”
Now the methods of science–controlling for variables and keeping records so that results are replicable–are spilling into the restaurant kitchen. Recipes and their accompanying lore are being rigorously dissected and described in the lab. Researchers at the forefronts of their disciplines are using principles of soft condensed matter physics, biochemistry, and molecular biology to understand bread, cheese fondue, and the mystery of milky sambuca.
“Twenty years ago there was no science of the souffle, bearnaise, chocolate mousse, or custard,’ says chemist and chef Herve This (pronounced Tiss), of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris.
FROM SPAM TO SAVORY Today there is that science, as fans of Iron Chef America or Top Chef can attest, and thanks in large part to This, one of the founding fathers of the field known as molecular gastronomy. He notes, however, that the science of food is not actually new, citing observations on the density of meat that date to the 2nd century B.C.
By the late 1700s, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, when he wasn’t articulating the law of conservation of mass, carried out elaborate experiments on the preparation of meat stock. At about the same time, physicist Benjamin Thompson (later Count Rumford) had made many forays into the kitchen, inventing a double boiler and percolating coffeepot.
But Rumford and Lavoisier’s ilk were exceptions. Early efforts to preserve food by canning, prompted by a need to nourish troops on the battlefield, set the tone for science’s contribution to cooking for the modern era.
“Restaurants and the tradition of preparing elaborate recipes were mostly ignored,” says Cesar Vega of the food research company Mars Botanical (an offshoot of Mars Inc) in Gaithersburg, Md. “The focus was on preserving food for long periods of time
kitchen canisters