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.