Chemistry in the Kitchen
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Bloody Shame cocktail is thickened tomato juice foam with celery "air" float. On the plates, fresh tomato pulp mousse over mozzarella di bufala; tomato basil soup sphere, balsamic vinegar sheet and olive oil powder on crostini with basil leaf. -
Vegan Chocolate Cake used no eggs or dairy products; the chocolate mint chantilly frosting is whipped chocolate and water with lecithin. The cake is garnished with agar-thickened raspberry "pearls." -
In 20 years, your kitchen might have a rotary evaporator, which rapidly concentrates liquids.
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"Ever wanted to boil water in ice? Cook an egg so the yolk is set but the white is still runny? Make 'caviar' from fruit juice, or noodles from yogurt?
"We will explore the science of molecular gastronomy through lectures and demos. We will reveal the chemistry and biochemistry of food ingredients and their preparation. With the kitchen as our laboratory, we'll delve into molecular cooking, and you will get to eat your lab results."
That was the bait in the course catalog that lured 28 students at Carnegie Mellon University to sign up for The Kitchen Chemistry Sessions, a five-week mini-course during the fall semester. It was the third offering of this new course.
Food science is a hot ticket these days. The stages for teaching it are books, national television shows and the Internet, some of it accurate, some not. Surely, this would be a fun class to audit, I thought.
With the professor's permission, I sat in on the classes, taught at Mellon Institute. I didn't understand the chemistry by a long shot, but I reveled in the creativeness of the teaching, as well as the students' remarkable transformations of food by applying chemical principles.
Subha Ranjan Das has been an assistant chemistry professor at CMU since 2006. He is interested in all things science and is also an accomplished home cook.
"Cooking for my family and friends appeals to both my inner and outer chemist," says Dr. Das, a young man who is intense, energetic and enthusiastic about all things. "I see people cooking on television shows, or writing about food on websites and blogs, and they don't explain the why of their actions. My thought is if these educated and experienced cooks are just now getting around to learning the science, why not flip that idea on its head? Why not study science first and apply those principles to an understanding of food? I decided to try to make the science palatable, literally."
Dr. Das is teaching his mini-course with the official approval and encouragement of the chemistry department, and the student response has been huge.
About that confounding name, "molecular gastronomy." Around 1987, a Catalonian Spanish chef named Ferran Adria began creating new and unusual food forms and textures by experimenting with a variety of chemical and physical techniques. His restaurant, El Bulli, is located in a Catalan coastal town near Barcelona, and the menu, a 30-course revolutionary dinner, has captured the imaginations of adventurous chefs around the world.
Through original techniques such as deconstruction, spherification, ultra-low temperature freezing and the creation of culinary foams and airs, Mr. Adria reimagined the basic characteristics of food, while celebrating and intensifying the natural flavors of his raw materials. Because of his work, restaurant cooking -- and to some extent home cooking -- has been changed forever.
First Published November 4, 2010 12:00 am
