Molecular Gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy, a movement of chefs devoted to the experimental tools of the modern science lab, now has its own Italian convention:

For three days last week some of the biggest names in "molecular gastronomy" (Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne) were mixing and matching secrets with more traditional chefs from Italy, France, Scandinavia, even Japan. The result was a dazzling exploration of new ways to cook fish, present pasta and generally make a restaurant meal more like a night at La Scala. Throw in sugar surrealism for dessert and it was hard to remember this was all happening in the land of plain fruit and tired tiramisu.

This was a conference that brought together a radical contingent from Scandinavia and the famed father-son team of Pierre and Michel Troisgros from France, as well as wildly inventive chefs from Spain and quiet revolutionaries from Sicily. There were chefs quoting Kandinsky and Lars von Trier as comfortably as they evoked Escoffier. There were chefs filling balloons with spices to pop over dinner plates, and chefs demonstrating how to flavor the bread crumbs so ubiquitous in Italian cooking with lime zest and syrup. They were using all the new-wave toys -- agar-agar and sous vide and digital thermometers and no end of Pakojets -- but they were also sharing discoveries as basic as this: Baking butternut squash or sweet onions on a bed of rock salt will concentrate the flavor and texture.

Personally, I'd take a simple bucatini all'amatriciana over some flavored agar any day of the week. I like to chew my food, and one of my big problems with molecular gastronomy is that you never chew anything. Everything is just swallowed.

A few years ago, I profiled The Fat Duck, a Michelin three star restaurant in England best known for its white chocolate/caviar amuse bouche and bacon and egg ice cream. The article is no longer on the Seed website, but google managed to find it:

I'm in the kitchen of the Fat Duck, a Michelin two-star 40 minutes west of London on a tranquil curve of the Thames. The chef, Heston Blumenthal, has a problem: His dessert tastes like horseshit. This is because Heston is trying to put Tryptophan and Valerian Acid, two proteins that induce sleepiness, into a little petit four. He wants you to relax as you're paying the bill. The Tryptophan is easy to disguise in a dessert. It came from the chemical company in the form of a tasteless white powder that Heston dissolved in Vahlrona chocolate, thus creating the world's first psychoactive chocolate souffle). The Valerian acid, however, came from the chemical company as an army green silt smelling of pond and manure - or, "tobacco and prune" as Heston says optimistically. So Heston mashes some prunes with fromage blanc, then adds a gram of the Valerian acid. He gives me a spoonful: "Horseshit," I say, only more bitter. A line cook walks in and wonders what smells so bad. Heston, still a believer, adds prune liquor. Drunk horseshit. Clearly, this isn't working.