How Do I Learn To Cook With Molecular Gastronomy?

a friend of mine wwas interested in this too, he started just experimenting with different things do some foams and mmove to other things. look online or books and get ideas from that. good luck

noticed u are a culinary student imsure some fo the chefs can help u or some of the other students may be interested too and help out

They have MG store on line. You can purchase the chemicals used in MG cooking and start  expriementing with them .Also the book "Exploring the science of taste, Food Science etc.

A lot of chefs these days aren't all that squeamish about throwing down some recipes with chemicals in them in their cookbooks these days. I am assuming the Alinea cookbook is chock full of them.

Oh...also On Cooking by Harold McGee is widely recommended by those who are into molecular gastronomy or even just cooking in general. It basically just explains the scientific processes involved in cooking and food production. Very interesting

Two British chefs who are noted for their MG style of cooking are Heston Blumenthal and Sat Baines.  Both have michelin-starred restaurants.  I don't know if Sat Baines has written any books, but HB certainly has, as well as having BBC TV series to his name.

The Spanish restaurant 'e bulli' was a lighthouse of MG - but it is due to close next year -rumoured to be due to the high cost of ingredients for their extensive menu.

The latest is that Ferran Adrian says the restaurant will NOT close permanently to be replaced by a cooking school -- which is what the NY Times says he said. 

He now says they'll close in 2012 and reopen in 2014 as a restaurant.  What he'll do in the meantime and what changes he has planned for the eventual reopening, quien sabe?

Let's not forget that Ferran and his brother are both "celebrity chefs" with heavy emphasis on both "celebrity" and "chef." 

Sounds like a vacation, an opportunity to look into other business opportunities, a chance to rethink the menu, and a remodel to me. 

BDL

I own a book that has Ferran Adria share his techniques and recipes for foams. However the book I own is a French translation of an English book, but I can't seem to locate the English version. Here's the French translation:

http://www.amazon.fr/Comme-un-chef-Jill-Norman/dp/203582351X/

According to information I was told, they weren't taking bookings for later than June 2012...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ishbel 

According to information I was told, they weren't taking bookings for later than June 2012...

They're currently not taking any bookings at all. 2010 has been sold out for months, and 2011 reservations won't start before December 2010. I heard the closing would be to reinvent the menu, I never heard any talks of permanently closing. Ferran said the way things work right now they cannot be creative any longer, all they can do is sustain what they have. So they want to close so they can experiment, create, and reinvent their menu.

I ate there a few years go.  A friend told me that when she contacted them to book a table for 16  - she was told that she had missed the deadline of mid-2012.

I have to admit, I'm not that enamoured of MG.  I have eaten at e Bulli, and three or four times at the Fat duck (HB's place). give me a Ramsay or Nairn or Novelli restaurant every time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ishbel 

I ate there a few years go.  A friend told me that when she contacted them to book a table for 16  - she was told that she had missed the deadline of mid-2012.

Interesting. I contacted them in February to get a booking for September, I was told they weren't taking any bookings as 2010 was sold out, and they didn't know what they were going to do in 2011 yet, and to inquire again in December 2010.

Well, I obviously cannot answer for the restaurant or its booking policies!

My husband  adores their  food/service.  Me?  I have to be honest and say that I've eaten better food, better served and cheaper in many other places in France, Italy, Spain and the UK!

When I realized I would travel to Europe in the summer I immediately thought of paying them a visit, but was quickly disappointed hearing they were sold out. I think I'll just visit a few restaurants in France, which should be fun obviously, but I really wanted to see for myself what all the hoopla was all about. Thanks for sharing your experience, I guess it proves that it's probably a very personal experience, your husband loving it and you not being impressed.

I'm curious, what are your favorite restaurants in France?

Grant Achatz also has a book out "Alinea" which would probably be the best resource. I think your best bet those if it is an option is to go an work for someone who is doing this type of cuisine.

It may be worth bearing in mind that Ferran Adria gets very shirty about his food being described as molecular gastronomy. He insists that it is nothing of the kind. Based on what Herve This seems to mean by the term, I think Adria is right -- his cuisine is not MG. Which makes very little difference, probably, to someone wanting to experiment at home....

sorry, color me square, but i just do not get the whole molecular thing...am i missing something?....if i order a bowl of clam chowder, i really don't want to see a piece of bacon on one part of the plate, then a piece of potato, then a little clam with cream and onion etc..would like to eat it all together..plus i think when you make certain foods, like a chowder or stew, the flavors mingle to benefit and nudge each other by cooking together...and who was the one to think up lettuce foam?...omg!

joey

There was a thread about this a month or so back, but in brief, you have to make a distinction between avant-garde cooking and pretentious nonsense. The line is not absolute, to be sure.

What you're talking about with the chowder is what's often called "deconstructed." We discussed this term at length in the other thread, and I won't repeat. It's also very questionable as to whether this should or should not be called "molecular gastronomy" anyway. But let's take all that as read, for a minute.

Suppose this is being done very, very well, and set up in the context of a meal that is also very well constructed and coherently thought through. In what way could "deconstructed" chowder make any sense?

One way would be to think, as a cook, about what "chowder" is, what it means, to the diner. So here we are in Boston, where chowder is a pretty well-known thing. There are longstanding fights about it -- no tomatoes, ever, in Boston. There are points of more minor disagreement: how much potato? salt pork or bacon, and how much? can corn go in with clams and/or fish? can clams and fish go together? should it be thin or thick, and how thick, and what thickener?

Now take the whole dish apart and put it back together in a way that asks the diner to contemplate these questions himself. Not answer them, but think about them. One way to do this would be to take the various pieces apart and serve them in a peculiar fashion, for example upside-down: stabilize the liquid soup as a mousse, let's say, and put it on top of a clamshell filled with fish braised in clam liquid, and garnish with bacon fat turned into a powder. Ideally, a bite including all ingredients would taste exactly like excellent clam chowder, but feel and look utterly different. The diner is asked to question just what "clam chowder" means here.

You can also use shock tactics in the same pursuit. Serve perfectly recognizable clams that are actually corn, a cream soup base that is actually pureed fish and clam, and so on, and then garnish with something apparently totally inappropriate --- like a single wedge of cherry tomato.

It's an aesthetic, intellectual game, at base. If the diner is stimulated in a wide range of ways, it's exciting and fun.

Now let's serve "deconstructed clam chowder" at a third-rate restaurant where it's on the "starters" menu at $12. Have two OK clams in a bowl, steamed, sitting with a piece of bacon and a potato, and on the side a little pot of cream soup base to pour on top.

This is pretentious nonsense, unquestionably. But do you see that they're not the same thing?

Well done, avant-garde cooking is worth doing, but not to anyone's taste all the time. That's part of its point, really: if you ate it all the time, it wouldn't refer to anything else, and would become silly and pretentious. But on the other hand, avant-garde cooking is not superior to other cooking, and those who lionize it often don't see this.

sorry, the chowder was a bad example..and you are right, it is more 'deconstruction' than molecular..okay, what about a ceasar salad and do the molecular thing...lettuce foam, crouton foam...,foam, foam foam...no chewing? seems to me that us homo sapiens need to chew things, at least i do..i like the act of chewing more than slurping, i guess...gotta go, but will revisit tomorrow when i can reread your very informative post....thanks

joey

Quote:

Originally Posted by durangojo 

sorry, the chowder was a bad example..and you are right, it is more 'deconstruction' than molecular..okay, what about a ceasar salad and do the molecular thing...lettuce foam, crouton foam...,foam, foam foam...no chewing? seems to me that us homo sapiens need to chew things, at least i do..i like the act of chewing more than slurping, i guess...gotta go, but will revisit tomorrow when i can reread your very informative post....thanks

joey

Have you ever seen a restaurant serving a ceasar salad where everything on the plate is foam? Of course not. It doesn't make any more sense than a meal where every course is dessert. Just because a meal made of "chocolate cake, lemon cake, carrot cake and vanilla cake" is ridiculous doesn't make each one of those cakes ridiculous by themselves.

Now consider this: a caesar salad with real lettuce, real croutons and real cheese, with a perfect sphere floating on top. The sphere is the dressing. When you prick it with the tip of your fork, the dressing comes bursting out and slowly spreads over the entire salad. That could be fun, no? 

What's wrong with wanting to play with textures, flavors, shapes, etc.... isn't that what any Chef does, molecular gastronomy or not? Take a good old pancake: what resemblance does it bear to the original products (wheat, eggs....)?

I think French Fries makes a good point here. And I don't think chowder is a bad example at all.

There are really two questions here. One is whether "molecular gastronomy" means something specific, and that's a fairly debatable point, by which I mean that there are complex arguments on both sides. I'm not, in my own opinion, competent to remark seriously on this one. The other would simply take the term as a general category of contemporary avant-garde cuisine. And in that context, deconstruction is one of many devices to achieve complex aesthetic ends.

What French Fries describes would not, by the usual reading, be deconstructive in a culinary sense. But it's a kind of avant-garde play. The point is to make the diner rethink what a Caesar salad is all about, and to do so in a way that is fun and interesting and novel. Novelty is crucial: if everyone starts serving Caesars that way, it becomes tedious very fast. That's the problem with avant-garde art in any medium.

For me, the problem of avant-garde cuisine as Adria or Redzepi do it (and that's very different) is to drive at the deepest heart of culinary norms: authenticity and simplicity. We have been trained, quite deeply in many cases, to believe that authentic, simple preparations are de facto superior. But what do these words mean?

Authentic: "authentic" Mexican, Indian, or Chinese cooking is nonsense from the get-go. Which region? What context? What period? What season? Consider, as an extreme example, high-end Japanese cuisine, most especially kaiseki. One can quite seriously argue that you cannot eat an authentic kaiseki meal outside Kyoto or its immediate surroundings. That's because being in Kyoto is part of the meal. So now here's me, some terrific chef (this is hypothetical -- I'm neither terrific nor a chef), and I present precisely the same food, in every respect, as some genius like Tanigawa Yoshimi would serve on precisely the same day and occasion, but I do it in Boston. What am I serving? Fraud? Allusion? What am I doing, exactly?

Simple: is jamon Iberico simple? In what sense? How about a great wine? Is it the number of ingredients, or the fact that these ingredients have been around X number of years, or what? Is it simpler to serve sourdough bread than an equally excellent yeast-leavened hearth bread? Is "simple" just a recapitulation of nostalgia? We've all read The Omnivore's Dilemma, or should have, so we all know that behind every steak or chop is a horrendously complicated food chain, natural or farmed or industrial or a mix. So what's "simple" about grilling a lamb chop?

For me, the aim of this kind of avant-garde cuisine should be to drive the diner's thoughts (and I hope the cook's too, but I'm not a pro) toward these kinds of questions, and to cast light on them in novel ways through the medium of the food itself. Do it enough times, in the same way, and it's just ideology; do it new and radical every time, wild and crazy and making us think every time, and it's a leap towards a language of food, in food, through food.

Last but not least: this is food as art. You can like that idea or hate it, think it's brilliant or pretentious or whatever, but in the end it's not susceptible to quite the same criteria as other kinds of cuisine. Not better, not worse, but a different object. And perhaps the greatest vote in favor of such attempts is precisely the fact that so many people, in good conscience and reasonable awareness, without being clueless or stupid or narrow, find the whole idea ludicrous. In a funny way, that's a good thing: it means something really is being challenged. But an aesthetic challenge is not necessarily something that requires submission: if you want to fight back, by rejecting the challenge (and not dismissing it, which is another thing entirely), on the basis of something else you've got in your own aesthetic quiver, you're part of the game and participating and doing something worth doing.

In short, if you hate this, even when it's done very well, I think it's incumbent on you to explain why. If you dislike it because you've seen it done as pretension, it's worthwhile to attack it as nonsense, explaining what you've seen. And then again, if you love it, it's equally important to explain yourself: why are you responding positively, and what makes you think this isn't nonsense? These are serious questions. And I think durangojo has a right to be skeptical --- that's what keeps this sort of art honest, in any medium.

i hate the term "molecular gastronomy". i wince everytime i say it. i wish that everyone could forget this terminology for what is simply another way of cooking. then again i have no definition for it myself. does it need a definition? haven't all of our prepared/convenience foods been a victim of "molecular gastronomy"? look at the labels and you will find most of the chemicals categorized as a newcomer in the culinary seen.

taking these ideas into a different direction doesn't make it necessarily new. it's still just cooking food. let's not get too far away from that. something new is always good and challenging. i just don't think that this movement needs to be put under a microscope and scrutinized.

food needs this. everyone who cooks needs this. we can't just take escoffier as the end all. food just like everything else is an evolving living thing. it will always change and when it isn't right nature will take it's course, bring it back and start again.

how much fun is cooking and eating?
 

it blew my mind when i first read a Jason Bourne book and realized it had nothing to do with the movie series.

likewise, i highly recommend picking up "Molecular Gastronomy" by Herve This as an appendix to this otherwise fascinating thread/topic

(edit: doh i failed to see my poitn was covered earlier)

Chef David Burke has been in the forefront of this for quite a while . He features it in all his places. You might read one of his books.

good day chefs,

thank you french fries and chrisLehrer for graciously taking the time to explain mg..i don't hate, like it or dislike it, and have actually never tasted it, i just didn't know about it...i'm really trying to think outside the box i'm in and your posts definately shed some much needed light. in the end, your point of textures got me, and would love to try it.. i live in ranch and farm country, so will have to wait for a 'big city' trip for that to happen. i do wonder though if part of this is just 'art for arts sake', looking to put the world on its ear, for a la minute...sounds like a lot of smoke and mirrors, which could add to the enjoyment..kinda like a food magic show!.....guess my biggest concern is its affordability..where and how does that fit into the 'big picture' and the dining out budget. with the economy the way it is and restaurants struggling just to stay afloat, how do the mg places fit in?  hard to have a food evolution, if you can't get people to eat your food cuz its too inaccessible or too pricey for the masses..and another point..is this food only for the upper crust? the elite?...ummm...again, thank you for your interesting, informative posts....just don't touch my hot dog!!

joey

Durangojo baybeeeeeeeeee,

I don't think mg will ever be your thing. Not that you don't have great technique, but you put it at the service of ingredients.  Molecular gastronomy tends to be the other way around.

Takes one to know one, as almost all of my food ideas are really ingredient driven as well.  I think it's partly a product of coming out of the Nouvelle/California Cuisine stream -- which is, I guess, kind of generational -- and interpreting it through the relatively straightforward regional, bistro, bourgeois, retro, and "boy food" viewpoints.

MG is more haute/International, stressing wit, surprise, charm, innovation and amusement over plates themed around quality, simplicity, rusticity and comfort.   

Just to be clear, I'm not saying one viewpoint is superior to the other.  They are different, though.  To be honest, I lack the talent and patience to plate well enough to make going through all the mg bs worthwhile. 

BDL

I find this a dangerous blanket statement (although I do appreciate that you used the word "tends to").

If you define MG as a set of culinary techniques, then it's up to the chef to decide to put those techniques (just like any other non-MG techniques) to the service of the ingredient or not. I believe Ferran Adria, who spends an unusually high amount of time studying his ingredients, their shape, texture, proportion, flavour, density, response to different cooking techniques and so on (his words, not mine), would strongly disagree.

Here's an extract from "A Day at El Bulli":

Experiments with local molluscs and crustaceans showed that most of the flavour is in the cooking liquor, and that some of the techniques traditionally applied to seafood, such as grilling, actually obscure the natural flavour. For the Mollusc platter - a dish of clams, scallops, oysters, sea urchins and barnacles - each item is cooked just long enough for its shell to open, and then it is encased in its own gelled cooking liquor, which intensifies the natural flavor. It is a complex cooking procedure and the recipe is very long, but the end result is that each item on the plate perfectly expresses its inherent flavours and textures. This deceptively simple dish is an homage to the sea, and the cooking techniques are designed to emphasize the ingredient's genes.
 

A passing note...
 

Two good points.

1. "Art for art's sake." Yes, I think that's exactly what it is. Yes, it's smoke and mirrors, for entertainment, but let's not forget that smoke and mirrors work, and that serving food in a restaurant is entertaining people. I'm not disagreeing with you -- I think a good deal of the point of avant-garde cooking is quite precisely to create an art object in culinary terms, and entertain people who like that basic notion. Which is not everyone.

2. As to the budget question, you're darn right. I should note that elBulli, Adria's place, is rumored to have lost money for quite a number of years --- fortunately he was making money elsewhere so it didn't matter that much. One reason for this is that Adria is a classic Catalan lefty-Marxisty-wacko type, and he gets upset by radical elitism. So how do you get a reservation? Luck, basically. Knowing the right people doesn't help unless the right people happen to be actually Adria or his brother or something. And while it's expensive, it's not actually so ludicrously expensive as you'd probably think --- I believe the current tab is something like $250 a head. The problem comes when you get places that are at least as expensive and are not anything like as good. If someone's doubling (or more) the cost of a dish because it's cute and clever and novel, that's everything negative you just pointed to. If someone's charging a fair, honest price for a dish, calculated the way every restaurant basically does it (food cost, labor cost, all that), the radical novelty of the thing becomes a selling point. I have never eaten at his restaurant, but I have heard that Wylie Dufresne (WD50 in Manhattan) is scrupulous about keeping his prices fair, and he's supposed to be pretty out there as American molecular types go. I have heard quite varied reports about Grant Achatz (Alinea in Chicago) on this score, but I know nothing certain. And so it goes.

P.S. French Fries --- I was about to say the same thing, then saw your much better post.

To counterpoint the budget argument, I recently had a $40 dinner (amuse-bouches, appetizer, main course, dessert) where the dessert was strawberry "caviar" (molecular gastronomy). That was in a hip area in the heart of Hollywood.

And I do remember this birthday party I went to about.... 15 years ago, in France, where my friend's dad (not a Chef by any means, a scientist) had brought home some liquid nitrogen from his lab, and we made instant ice cream with it. I had never even heard of the term molecular gastronomy at the time, and I just thought that was a lot of fun. Out of the 40 or so guests, 7 or 8 of us thought that was fun, while the rest were busy shaking champagne bottle to then spray them on the other guests.

Molecular gastronomy doesn't HAVE to be expensive. It's only expensive because it's fashionable, just like many other things. I mean, there was a time when no one would ever think of eating lobsters and they were used as fertilizer.

I predict that just like with many new techniques in art, the worst of it will eventually be deemed uninteresting and abandoned, and the best of it will be absorbed in the vast repertoire of classic technique as.. just another classic technique. I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now you see strawberry caviar sold for $2.99 at the candy aisle of your supermarket.