My Experiences With Molecular Gastronomy

I've been pretty much obsessed with food journalism and cuisines since I was in elementary school. My parents have fostered this, and on my birthday every year, they allow me to choose a restaurant. Over the past few years, these choices have skewed more towards modern American cuisine, which in turn has had many dishes rooted in molecular gastronomy. In this entry, I'm going to present three dishes that I've had over the past two years that have had an impact on me.

This first dish is fried milk, with chocolate milk, toasted milk, and milk sherbet, from Uchiko. This dish utilized nitrogenization, a staple process of molecular gastronomy, in the sherbet and the fried milk portions. It tasted like the thesis of ice cream, a benchmark that every other type should be based on. Insanely good.

This second dish is from Congress, a newer haute cuisine restaurant that required me spending my own money to get half the meal to convince a cousin to take me. (Worth it, though) This dish is steak tartare with fried kale; the molecular element comes from the presentation, in which the steak tartare was freeze dried, and then very lightly seared.

  This last dish is seriously the best thing that's ever been in my mouth. It's quail on a bed of carmelized onions with arugula, and while it is simple, the presentation was perfect, and it was just so good. This restaurant is Barley Swine, the brick and mortar branch of the Odd Duck trailer.

Heston Blumenthal

Heston Blumenthal, along with Ferran Adria, is one of the biggest proponents of molecular gastronomy on a world stage. Like Adria, he also has decried the term “molecular gastronomy”. However, where Adria embraces the deconstructivist approach to experimental cooking, Blumenthal has run in the completely opposite direction. At his restaurant (The Fat Duck in Berkshire, England), Blumenthal has created dishes such as an edible watch that dissolves in a cup of tea (a nod to Alice In Wonderland), and a dish called “Sound of the Sea”, which features seafood foam along with an iPod playing ambient ocean sounds.

Blumenthal is a self-taught chef, whose only prior experience was unpaid, impermanent positions at places run by notable chefs such as Marco Pierre White and Raymond Blanc. He reached international prominence with The Fat Duck, his first restaurant, and has since achieved celebrity status, creating a very popular television miniseries called Kitchen Chemistry, as well as being featured in films and television, such as The Trip.

Blumenthal's stated intention is to change the customary perceptions of a diner by assigning different flavors to little used textures, such as bacon and egg ice cream, or sardine on toast sorbet. To achieve this, Blumethals kitchen is more like a laboratory than a traditional kitchen, replete with centrifuges and vacuums. If Ferran Adria seeks to minimalize the art of molecular gastronomy, then Blumenthal is his mad scientist twin, forever looking for ways to maximalize the potential of combining chemistry and cooking.

Alinea and Per Se

Alinea was the first notable American restaurant to fully embrace Ferran Adria’s deconstructivist ideals and apply them to a Continental kitchen style. Located in Chicago, Alinea is one of the few 3-Michelin starred restaurants located in the U.S., and has accomplished this while retaining a distinctly American air. For example, one of the entrees, a pheasant breast, is accompanied by burning oak leaves, adding an olfactory suburban element to a very European dish. Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, approaches cooking as a science project, and exemplifies the art of molecular gastronomy in a populist, American way.

While Alinea takes a distinctly American route in its approach towards molecular gastronomy, Per Se, located in NYC, charges down an entirely different route. Thomas Keller, the head chef, takes a very traditional European approach while still utilizing American elements; for example, one of his desserts is donuts and coffee, with an Italian twist, as the coffee is a semi-freddo. Another 3-Michelin Star restaurant, Per Se exemplifies the more maximalist nature of molecular gastronomy used by Blumenthal, utilizing foams and jellies in a glorious excess. 

Ferran Adria

Ferran Adria was the chef at the now-closed el Bulli, which has been detailed in earlier entries. Learning his craft in the town of Castelldefels in the early 1980s, Adria worked under the tutelage of a very traditional Spanish chef, and later served as a cook in Spain’s armed forces. 

He became the head chef of a steady, traditional restaurant in 1985. Located on the Costa Brava in the town of Roses, Catalonia, this restaurant was called El Bulli, named after the French bulldogs of a previous owner. After nearly a decade of providing excellent, but staid fare, Adria and his partner sold 20% of their restaurant to a millionaire named Miquel Horta. The large influx of cash resulting from this purchase allowed Adria and his partner to expand the kitchen and accommodate a new, elite class of customers that ranged from celebrities to politicians to corporate executives. 

Adria began to develop new techniques, utlizing foam in many dishes and creating “mimetic” products, such as olives made entirely of gel and olive oil, or peanuts made of peanut gelatin. These techniques allowed Adria to get the purest possible flavors for his creations, harkening back to his stated intention to “deconstruct” traditional Catalan and Spanish cuisine. Key to understanding Adria’s style of cooking is recognizing his traditional training, and subsequent mastery of the style. The molecular gastronomical elements of Adria’s cooking represent an endless creative quest, driven by an absolute master in his craft.

Catalonian Cuisine

• Catalan cuisine is influenced as much by Spanish cuisine as it is by cuisines from other varied locales, including Balearic, Valencian, and Southern French. This mixture reinforces the separate cultural identity that Catalonia retains from the rest of Spain, and has contributed to the growth of experimental techniques there.
  Geographic disparity also plays a role in Catalan cooking. The state ranges from coastal regions to mountainous regions, and this is reflected in the variety of dishes, from pork-based stews to dishes dominated by fish and coastal vegetables. A central sauce in Catalan cooking is Allioli, a sauce made of garlic and olive oil.
  Some other important dishes in Catalan cuisine include cod served with pine nuts and raisins, escalivada (grilled vegetables), and embotits, a term used for different types of pork sausage. Catalan cuisine is very Mediterranean, utilizing citrus and olive oil. The basic nature of its tastes (savory and hearty, sweet and creamy, earthy) lend themselves very well to the deconstructivist nature of molecular gastronomy, as evidenced by el Bulli and countless copycat restaurants.  

  

Roses, Catalonia

Catalonia is an autonomous community located in northeastern Spain, directly south of France. It is comparable to Quebec in Canada in that it has a distinctive language and culture that is not shared with the rest of Spain. This extends to cuisine, but I'll go into that further in my next entry. 

el Bulli was located in Catalonia, and adapted many of its traditional flavors and dishes into something wholly unique that inspired an entire generation of chefs. 

Catalonia is a different beast than the rest of Spain. Its culture is rooted less in machismo and more in artistic achievement. An example of this is the banning of bullfighting, a Spanish tradition, in all of Catalonia. The focus on the arts has led to the regions status as a creative center, in mediums such as architecture (La Sagrada Familia) and dance (Patum de Berga); this extends to cuisine, where traditional Catalonian dishes have been adapted within the structure of molecular gastronomy into a kind of culinary meme, replicated worldwide.

 

el Bulli

el Bulli was a Michelin 3-star restaurant (the highest rating) that was located in Roses, Catalonia. It gained international fame for the deconstructivist and molecular cooking styles of its head chef, an outspoken man named Ferran Adria who slowly became the face of Spanish cuisine on an international stage. 

el Bulli is important because it was the first restaurant focused entirely on progressive styles of cooking firmly rooted in molecular gastronomy with the intention of adapting traditional Spanish tastes into something deeply imaginative. 

Cuisine at el Bulli was dicated by texture. A famous dish was a frozen globe of ricotta cheese, presented to the diner with a hammer, which was then used to shatter the globe into bite-size pieces. Another was a spring made of congealed olive oil, placed on the finger and left to dissolve in the diners mouth. These dishes exemplify basic traditional tastes in Spanish cuisine, molded to fit a haute format, but still defined as much by their taste as their presentation. 

el Bulli marked a shift in haute cuisine from an obsession with expensive ingredients and elaborate presentation into one marked by an obsession with taste and texture, with interesting presentation just a by-product of presenting the best possible dish made of simple flavors.