Molecular Gastronomy Domine

Alice Waters let me down this week. It’s not the first time, won’t be the last, I’m sure. I was listening to a riveting episode of a podcast called Freakonomics Radio entitled ‘Waiter, there’s a Physicist in My Soup!’ The podcast revolved around the no longer quite so new trend of ‘molecular gastronomy’ and the work of physicist/cookbook author Nathan Myhrvold, whose monstrous tome ‘Modernist Cuisine’ will be hitting the shelves sometime soon. Alice, it seems, was brought on to ‘balance’ the conversation but she, I must admit, left me wishing for more.



I first encountered ‘modernist cuisine’ while working in San Francisco, when I started to hear rumblings on the fringes of the culinary world about a Spanish chef, Ferran Adria, who was making waves, winning awards, changing the game. At first blush, I was enamoured, he seemed to represent a next logical step for folks like me, folks who wanted to push the creative boundaries of high end cuisine. Millennium, where I worked at the time, also relied heavily on unusual techniques to translate our vegan concepts for a mass audience. I read about Adria’s deconstructionist ideas and began to incorporate them into my own dishes—rethinking everything from tamales to bouillabaisse...I found myself asking “what is it about this dish that makes it specifically ‘this’ dish?” and in the answers, often, I found lots of room to play.



I also read about Heston Blumenthal, owner of Britain’s The Fat Duck, perennial ‘second best restaurant in the world’ (placing, for many of the last several years, just behind Adria’s ElBulli in the British magazine Restaurant’s prestigious annual poll) and another proponent of high concept technique. Other names appeared in connection with this movement, Herve Thís, Nicolas Kurti, José Andrés, and my personal favourite, Harold Mcgee, a food scientist who made a name for himself by debunking old wives tales (like the one about how searing the meat ‘seals in the juices’) with a combination of accessible writing and meticulous attention to detail as well as to the scientific method.



I liked these ideas about deconstruction, about re-imagining what was possible with food, even about pulling techniques from one discipline (like pastry or Asian) to another. Savoury ice creams and sorbets became common (at least in our world), foams and whips, intentionally broken emulsions, layering hot, cold, raw and cooked foods in new ways to achieve unusual and even incredible results. In many ways what we were doing was adding value to ingredients, providing a justification for our prices in the same way that our choice of plates, linens, décor and even our music helped to ease our patrons into a more ‘high dollar’ kind of mood.



In the next few years, I read about and was a witness to even more elaborate techniques; flash freezing with liquid nitrogen, sous-vide cooking (poaching foods for hours or days in a water bath inside vacuum sealed bags), dehydrators, vacuum infusions, using blowtorches and various chemical reactions with calcium chloride, sodium alginate and other pharmaceutical sounding ingredients to achieve new textures, new flavours, and new presentations. Edible printing on edible paper, smoking a chocolate cake in a pipe...The weirder the idea, the more likely it was that one of these molecular gastronomy types had tried it.



It was fun, but over time, I had to ask myself, “Is this real food? Is this important?” It certainly felt important, to be a part of the ‘new cuisine’, but the more closely I examined it, the less important it seemed. My chef, Eric Tucker, always kept a good head on his shoulders about that stuff. He liked to cook pretty close to the mark—he had a wild streak, for sure, that would come out at wine pairing dinners, for New Years Eve or for other special events; and he certainly indulged my whims and those of the rest of the kitchen staff, investing in foaming canisters and the like, things like agar gelatin and xanthum gum; but Eric was, at heart, a farmers’ market kind of guy. He liked the best produce around, the most unusual and fun ingredients, new varieties of basil or peppers, white asparagus from this guy, stinging nettles or wild cinnamon cap mushrooms from that. He favoured ethnic preparations, traditional dishes with a history of comfort. Where I found that I reveled in the possibilities of experimenting with various meat substitutes to replicate or expand on the meat dishes of fine cuisines, he seemed to seek out traditional recipes that had never had a meat component to begin with, or if it did, it was something we could easily replace with a minimum amount of distraction.



I also met a lot of farmers in this period, working with Eric, and as his sous chef, I found myself fielding several calls a day from various purveyors, farmers, producers, foragers, characters and even outlaws. Eric would have a line out on huitlacoche, an edible fungus that grows on ears of corn, and months later would receive a call and have to drive to a parking lot in the suburbs to trade brown paper bags of infected ears for wads of cash like some kind of mid level drug dealer. Shifty types would appear by the dumpster late at night with some weird variety of peach they had scaled a fence to secure. These farmers and foragers had no interest in molecular gastronomy, they were interested in botany, maybe a bit of biology; it was a science, to be sure, of a different sort.



I also discovered some other chefs who were adding value to their food through entirely different means. Technique, yes, but technique informed by a combination of traditional methods and the new science. Chefs like Alice Waters, Patrick O’Connell, Paul Bertolli and Thomas Keller. Chefs who added value the way Eric did, by shopping well, seeking out the best of the best, and also by honouring the generations of technicians who had gone before.



Molecular gastronomy is exciting and fun and is not going anywhere anytime soon; as long as there are people out there who are willing to pay for a value added experience, for flash and bang, for a bit of excitement. But my interest in its merits, over time, has certainly begun to fade. As it has, I feel, with the gastronomic community as a whole—this past year’s winner of Restaurant magazine’s prestigious best restaurant in the world award was a restaurant named Noma in Copenhagen that specializes in the ultra local and the pure. Noma’s Chef Rene Redzepi is an almost literal bridge between the two worlds I am attempting to describe; he has trained with both Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller. His award, in my mind, marks a fork (knife and spoon?) in the road of our collective culinary journey. His restaurant points to a path that doesn’t lead away from this new cuisine; it leads through it.



I believe that some of the techniques and approaches pioneered by molecular gastronomy will stick; some already have; food and cooking, after all, is science. In that regard, it’s just a new name for an old idea. Many of the grand techniques developed by great chefs over time were simply the best science they had to work with in their day or were the result of the same experimental techniques of trial and error (and/or happy accidents) that drive mainstream science today. Escoffier would have welcomed a physicist in his kitchen in much the same way as our top chefs do today. But I don’t think that molecular gastronomy will subvert, supplant or replace our existing cuisine as a whole, either.



So how did Alice Waters let me down? Alice, in a word, is a highly important symbol for the organic and local foods movement. Some would say that she has been the engine of change. Yet when she spoke on this show about her love of simplicity, of her annoyance with high concept technique, she honestly came across as a Luddite. And possibly even a little bit dotty. I, at first, blamed the edit—the hosts of the show have worked with Myhrvold in the past, and I can’t help but feel that this episode, while fascinating, was also a bit of a plug for his upcoming six volume widely acclaimed (even before being published) new encyclopedic treatise on all of the techniques developed so far in this new and fascinating world of high concept ‘modernist cuisine.’ Myhrvold was certainly the focus and Alice just didn’t read as well in this show. I felt annoyed that she didn’t ask (or didn’t get to ask...) what seemed to me like the most important questions, the ones that keep me up at night, the real reason that I don’t think molecular gastronomy will be changing the way we eat on the whole anytime soon. The questions that I would like to ask are these: “Is all this important? Does this really matter?”



Does tapioca starch infused seaweed caviar help to feed the hungry? Does smoking chocolate cake in a pipe help to clean up the environment? Does three-quarters of the world living on less than two dollars a day in any way benefit from seawater foam or bacon ice cream? I don’t know. Granted, those folks aren’t eating at Chez Panisse either (Alice Waters’ famous culinary Mecca), but at least some of the food science that I associate with the movement she has come to symbolize, the science of organic and sustainable farming, of biodiversity, of local foods, of clean, healthy and community building food sourcing, of finding harmony between our food choices and the things in which we believe; at least those ideals have a chance of changing something more than how exciting our expensive meal will be tonight. I guess that’s why I felt like she let me down. But that’s OK, because I can always just ask those questions myself, right?



You know what? So can you.