Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This
This is a very interesting and somewhat controversial book written by French chef Hervé This (pronounced Tees). It’s interesting because he uses scientific thinking and procedures to investigate the scientific processes behind foods like emulsions and hard boiled eggs, behind phenonomena like taste and olfaction, and to prove or debunk kitchen traditions. It was this part of the book that many chefs did not like when the book was originally published. Many chefs did not appreciate what they viewed as a lack of respect for tradition, in challenging commonly held beliefs such as gnocchi are done when they float and that stock should be started with cold water. For the stock question, This conducts an experiment where he takes two pieces of beef, from the same cow, weighing exactly the same and puts one in boiling water and one in cold water and brings it to a boil. After a few hours he removes the two, weighs the beef pieces, and conducts a rigorous taste test. The pieces weighed the same after cooking and the tasters could tell little difference between the two. In fact, when differences were detected, the stock started in boiling water was usually preferred. I like his forward thinking and use of scientific reasoning in cooking. It really forces you to think at such an elementary level to improve every phase of cooking.
The book is organized into four parts, each organized into very small chapters in which he proposes a question, investigates the question with an experiment, discusses what the results mean, and explains how this can be used to the cooks advantage. Additionally, he often proposes new ideas and suggestions of what can be done with this new, and often surprising, culinary knowledge. In the first part he investigates “Secrets of The Kitchen,” disproving ideas like the already mentioned stock question and whether salting meat before or after grilling makes a difference. This’ experiments support notions that red wine is preferable for marinating meats and that copper is best used for cooking preserves. He goes beyond merely confirming these notions, however, and explains why. One of the more interesting chapters was about preventing oxidation, or browning when exposed to air, like apples and avocados do, in foods. He tested the idea that it is the acid in general from lemon juice that prevents foods from oxidizing. By this logic, vinegar would do the same trick since it is acidic as well. But, try dousing some cut apples in vinegar and they will brown. Upon closer investigation, we find that it’s the ascorbic acid that preserves color and freshness. What can this knowledge do for our cooking? If you’ve ever looked in the vitamin and supplement aisle at the pharmacy you may have noticed that they sell tablets of pure ascorbic acid. Lets say you want to preserve the color of an avocado puree for example. Use some ascorbic acid and the color will be preserved longer and you won’t overpower the flavor with lemon, if that’s a flavor you want to avoid.
In the second part of the book, entitled “The Physiology of Flavor,” a spin on Brillat-Savarin’s “The Physiology of Taste,” This investigates how we taste and perceive tastes, on a molecular and biological level. A lot of the language and terms he uses are dense, including a lot of talk about specific organic molecules and taste receptors, but he does a great job (and the translator who transcribed from French did a great job) of explaining what this means in lay terms. Basically we perceive flavors differently depending on a lot of things, like temperature, physical state of the food, and other kinds of molecules present in the food (fat as opposed to water for example). This means that, although recipes for roast duck that call for roasting the duck then making a stock from the duck pieces sound redundant, they make scientific sense because we taste the duck differently and for different amounts of time in both these forms. Brought together, they create a more complex and richer duck flavor.
The third part of the book is titled “Investigations and Models” and goes into great detail about things like how regional ecosystems affect the taste of cheese, what aging does to certain wines to improve their flavor, and the nature of emulsions. This loves emulsions, which are defined a dispersion of droplets of one liquid in another, usually water in fat. An emulsion that we all know is mayonnaise.
The third part blends well into the final section, “A Cuisine for Tomorrow,” where This suggests we use our scientific knowledge, logical thinking, and 21st century technology to be innovative and creative in the kitchen. He continues with his discussion of emulsions. This makes a mayonnaise without egg yolk. He explains that it’s the tensioactive proteins in the yolk that form a network of protein when whisked that traps the water in the fat. But egg white contains these proteins, and he whisks an egg white while slowly adding oil to make a yolkless mayonnaise. But why not go a step further and get rid of the egg completely? Gelatin contains tensioactive proteins. Dissolve a sheet of gelatin in some warm water and whisk it vigorously while adding oil. You have a oil-water emulsion without eggs. But go one step further. This explains how these proteins are present in almost any food, and are able to be used when the food is ground. Aioli is made by slowly adding oil to ground garlic. This makes a zucchini emulsion then a beef emulsion. This explains by varying how much protein you add, how long you whisk, and what type of liquid you use for the water and oil, one can make great emulsions and foams that are light and add great textural elements to a dish. A recipe that I am definitely going to try soon is a cream and egg-less chocolate mouse. This instructs us that we can make a chocolate emulsion by whisking chocolate with some liquid containing water and some gelatin over low heat. The ingredients will blend and thicken. When vigorously whisked on top of ice, air is added to the emulsion, the mixture increases in volume, and the color changes. Now we have a chocolate mousse. If this was made with egg whites, you can microwave it. The egg white protein mesh would set, trapping the chocolate molecules inside, forming a sort of chocolate cake.
Overall, I’m not the biggest fan of extreme molecular gastronomy that chefs like Ferran Adriá and Wylie Dufresne practice. I think a lot of the time ingredients are too far removed from their original form and the food becomes far too focused on technique rather than ingredients. However, This’ book presents a method of investigating food that is so in depth and revealing that it forces you to reassess how much you think you know about food.
54 comments
I look forward to reading it. I think we should do some molecular gastronomy of our own.
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Thanks for the review, but may I say that I am not a chef, but rather a scientist?
Then, there is perhaps a confusion between “molecular cooking” (= cooking) and molecular gastronomy (= science).
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