Molecular Gastronomy. Is this just a fancy title that means "I ate my chemistry experiment?"
I first heard about this cooking phase/craze on one of my favorite Food Network shows, "Chopped". One of the "Chopped" champions used molecular gastronomic ingredients and the judges kept remarking about them. I paid little attention to the remarks except to recognize that most of the ingredients they were speaking about I had never heard of. Fast forward to today's newspaper and one of the daily inserts. There is an article entitled, "The Science of Food" and the article details molecular cooking techniques and applications.
The closest I ever came to molecular gastronomy was hearing a conversation from my favorite son about how he made homemade ice cream using liquid nitrogen. I thought this was particularly appropriate for a physics major to try his hand at so I didn't give it a second thought. But today's article uses terms such as "cooking chemicals" and "chemical cooking", which sound more like an illegal lab somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountain area than something I'd want in my own kitchen......or anyone else's for that matter.
Two recipes are printed and they contain ingredients with names that seem more appropriate for AP Chemistry than Betty Crocker's test kitchen. Imagine going to the store and asking where you could buy sodium alginate (sound like a product used to clean fish tanks), calcium chloride (sounds like the stuff that collects at the base of my water faucets), or agar-agar which sounds like an utterance from a Biblical stutterer. To add to the confounding, the recipes are printed using metric measurements, which might as well be printed using hieroglyphics as far as I am concerned. For us ignorant Americans who gave up on and dissed metric decades ago, trying to follow a recipe that says, "pour into a flat tray so that liquid is 2 millemeters thick" or "Cut the soy gel into 15-by-15-centimeter squares." would simply lead to culinary disaster. I would have no clue what thickness 2 millimeters was and my soy gel squares wouldn't fit onto even the largest of dinner plates. I'm more at home with Paula Deen's method of cooking or even my knuckle-dragging ancestors' techniques that required their freshly-caught-still-mooing-game be roasted over an open flame. I did enough science experiments in high school.
Ancora imparo
