The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula

An anonymous reader writes "French chemist and cook Hervé This maintains his quest to find the scientific precision behind great tasting food. Chef This is just one of a growing number of cooks that approaches food from a scientific perspective; making recipes in a lab instead of in the kitchen. The difference is that This was one of the pioneers of the field. 'This and a colleague, the late Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti, conducted the experiments in their spare time. In 1988, the pair coined a term to describe their nascent field: molecular gastronomy. The name has since been applied to the kitchen wizardry of chefs like el Bulli's Ferran Adria and Alinea's Grant Achatz. But This is interested in basic culinary knowledge -- not flashy preparations -- and has continued to accumulate his precisions, which now number some 25,000.'"

Re:But does it taste good?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Cooking, molecular or otherwise, is not about getting the recipe right to the nth decimal. As someone wrote in another post, you'll always have variations in products, temperatures, cooking ware etc. Completing a recipe to perfection has a lot to do with reacting to feedback: knowing your ingredients, smells, texture, taste. Mrs. Farmhouse got it right with her "looks ok" approach; the "scientific chef" was being a silly. If you ignore the feedback and just watch the egg timer, it won't come out as good.

Cooking science is about understanding what happens to food when we prepare it. It won't give us a runbook to achieve that perfect flavour, but it will help us to understand the process so that we get better at managing it.

One-liner book review

[Stavr0]

If you're a science geek get these books
If you're a cooking geek ('foodie') get these books

If you're a science geek and a cooking geek you already have these books.

Molecular Gastronomy would make an excellent Slashdot book review.