Molecular gastronomy: Physics and chemistry in your kitchen

Molecular gastronomy did not appear yesterday (and not even the day before yesterday), but many still consider it a perversion, available only in selected restaurants and for insane money. In fact, "molecular", it is also "culinary physics" - just a scientific approach to the preparation of the usual products and dishes. We asked Anton Utkin to explain his basic principles - an amateur cook with experience and the happy owner of all the volumes of "Modernist Cuisine", who had been trained by Isaac Correa in Montalto and sometimes prepared for friends and acquaintances.

Molecular gastronomy Modernist cuisine, culinary physics - all these words describe the slow but steady reformation of food and its preparation, which is taking place all over the world right now. Russia is very hard on this reform. Wave-like bouts of metropolitan fashion for individual products and culinary tendencies - mitbols, burgers, macaroons - do not do general weather, because in the country of unconditionally winning mayonnaise and endless advertising of gastrointestinal drugs, almost any talk about modernist cuisine causes the interlocutor to have a complex range of feelings from mistrust to rage. A detailed conversation will find out that yes, the interlocutor is aware that something like that Shurshakov does in “The Seagull”, and here in the “Ragout” they indulge in this, but this is terribly far from the people.

The card of the modernist cuisine is the restaurant ElBulli of the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià; since the 90s of the last century and up to the closing of the restaurant in 2011, Adria surprised the guests with his deconstructive experiments: traditional dishes fell into separate ingredients, the ingredients changed shape, color and taste, new textures appeared - for example, cooking foam, beat in which you can almost any liquid. Shock, awe, surprise, orgasm in the mouth! Half a year the restaurant worked, and the other half Adria experimented with his team, inventing new dishes. The trend was gradually picked up by the most forward-looking chefs around the world — Heston Blumenthal from Fat Duck, Grant Akez from Alinea, Wiley Dufren from wd ~ 50, and others — and now you can try molecular cuisine for simplicity. major gastronomic capital of the planet. Very good, but why beat the sauce in foam and solder the steak in a vacuum?

How to boil a soft-boiled egg and not miss? Not many people know that white and yolk coagulate at different, but very specific temperatures.

The answer to these questions is given by food science - what is clumsily called in Russian "food processing technologies". This is a well-formed and established corpus of knowledge about food and its preparation at the junction of several sciences at once - chemistry, physics and biology. Basically, this knowledge is used by manufacturers of bulk food, convenience foods, by-products and fast food to produce long-stored yogurts, dumplings, meat preparations, juices, water, canned food, cheaply and quickly, but until recently, few people, except food technologists, understood how to work seriously with food. The father of modernist gastronomy, physicist Nicholas Kurti, who in the early 1990s held an industry conference for food technologists, scientists and cooks in Italy, ironically commented on this situation as follows: “It’s sad that we, as a civilization, can measure the temperature of the Venusian atmosphere, but don’t understand what processes take place inside our soufflé [while cooking]. "

And really - at what temperature is it right to fry meat? How to make the milk no longer turn sour? How do yeasts work? And the most important question that any novice confectioner asks after the first few failures is how to bake a beautiful cake and not suffer a deafening defeat? Have you kept a cookbook for a long time that would really answer all these questions? If so, then the authors were either Herve Tees or Harold McGee - two other famous popularizers of modernist cuisine who inspired Adria and the company to gastronomic experiments with chemistry and physics of kitchen processes. No, really: from year to year users of culinary forums break spears about the simplest things - let's say, how to cook a soft-boiled egg and not to miss? And the spears continue to break, because not many people know that the whites and yolks coagulate at different, but quite specific temperatures.

Physics, chemistry and biology, which came to the aid of gastronomy, is, in general, molecular cuisine. If you put the egg in water with a temperature of 64ºC, then in 35 minutes you will get the perfect soft-boiled egg with an incredible creamy consistency; Yes, for this you need a device called a thermal circulator - in general it is a submersible water heater with a water pump and a microprocessor, nothing complicated - but an egg will be obtained time after time, without refusal. Physics, chemistry, and no chance of failure.

The latest wave of interest in modernist gastronomy is associated with the recent release of the five-volume "Modernist Cuisine" - Microsoft's former technical director Nathan Mirvold, a multi-millionaire and kitchen enthusiast, spent several years writing dozens of people to write the most comprehensive tutorial on cooking technologies; This is a topic for separate discussion, but the thousand-page volumes describe in detail centrifuges and rotary evaporators, liquid nitrogen and combi-steamers, wheat protein isolate and preliminary gelatinization of rice. A year ago, the same team released a still weighty, but not so demoralizing volume "Modernist Cuisine at Home", which all these exotic techniques are projecting into home cooking. This is the first ever cooked home cookbook that explains what actually happens to your food while you cook it.

And that's what it turns out. First, modernist cuisine is a way to cook faster, more accurately and more confidently. Want a steak to always go juicy and soft? Adjust the stove and get a digital meat thermometer. Secondly, you can not do without gadgets: scales, siphon, vacuumizer, grater-microplan, submersible blender, pressure cooker, caramel burner - but all this will give you the choice of "new iPhone or newly converted kitchen". Thirdly, for the most interesting recipes you will need nutritional supplements - yes, those terrible nutritional supplements from which horns and a second pair of breasts grow - but here every skeptic should approach the refrigerator and carefully study the contents of your favorite yogurt, and then go in the bathroom and do the same with your favorite toothpaste. More experienced skeptics can spend an exciting evening at PubMed, after which the “xanthan gum” that we see several times a day in cosmetics, yogurt and industrial sauces under the E415 label will no longer seem like a nightmare and become the best friend in the kitchen: this colorless and the tasteless polysaccharide is practically not absorbed by the body (and derived from it), but it turns almost any liquid into a thick sauce in literally seconds. Or take agar-agar: using a small pan and a submersible blender, you can make a full-fledged bechamel from hard cheese and milk in a couple of minutes - easily, without flour and long stirring. And so on almost the entire list: algae extracts, relatives of table salt, fermented foods, egg white and yolk in powder form - in short, nothing that we would not eat for thousands of years, just collected as an extract, essence or extract.

A bunch of negative opinions about molecular gastronomy - a natural human reaction to everything new and unexplored. For a Soviet person, the desire to put raw fish on a piece of cooked rice and immediately eat them together would seem unnatural and unpleasant. Microwave ovens have done the same way: to exploit an absolutely dangerous magnetron inside a household appliance in the last century seemed something out of the ordinary, but now this is a common way to cheaply and quickly heat any food from the refrigerator (and even cooked something interesting would desire). Molecular gastronomy is waiting for the same way: gradually everyone will soften, then they will, and there they will love. As an illustration, some simple and trouble-free recipes for the home, explaining why it is great and fast.

1

The secret of cooking pasta

Hybrid of two different tips - Herve Tisza and Harold McGee, but first we will dispel several myths. First, it is believed that you need a lot of water. No no need. Secondly, it is believed that you need to put the pasta in boiling water. No no need. Thirdly, so that the paste does not stick together, it is customary to add butter. No, it can be added later, already on a plate: French scientists ™ from Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique have found out experimentally that there is no point in the oil in the pan.

2

Sous vide home

Su-view is a low-temperature method of cooking food in a vacuum, known since the end of the 18th century. Fish and meat come out especially well: in order to completely curl, different types of proteins need temperatures of 50-70 degrees Celsius, but not at all the hell of an oven or grill. Vacuum is also not needed: it is necessary to somehow separate the food from the water in which it is boiled.

3

Clear broth

The best way to quickly cook the most delicious and transparent enough broth is to start the pressure cooker and do not forget to chop the ingredients into small pieces; The whole onion in the soup is a laziness of a cook and the taste is not fully extracted. However, there is a completely scientific way to clear any ready-made broth without the agonizing multi-stage filtering and get what millions of housewives around the world unsuccessfully chase.