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[title]Even if you've never dined at the likes of Ferran Adria's El Bulli or Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck, you've definitely tried molecular cuisine. It's permeated its way into the everyday restaurant, café and even hawker stall, with chefs using sous-vide immersion circulators to perfectly cook eggs, siphons to create foams and different gelling agents to deliver sauces.
Molecular cuisine is a subset of molecular gastronomy, a scientific study of the mechanisms that occur when one cooks. Professor Hervé This is one of the founding fathers of molecular gastronomy and cooking, and more recently he's been working on note-by-note cooking – synthetic cooking made from pure, edible chemical compounds instead of plant or animal tissue. He was in Singapore last month at At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy to share more about his scientific research and how food science is the solution to creating food sustainably. We chat with the illustrious scientist to find out more.
What's a day in your life like?
I am a physical chemist and I spend my days doing science with my scientific research team in the laboratory. My goal is to make scientific discoveries – I recently created a whole set of possible gels known as 'dynagels' – by pursuing scientific questions and dreaming day and night about new things that can be done. As a side activity, I've been inventing one new food preparation per month for more than 18 years. I give them first to my friend Pierre Gagnaire, who makes these recipes available to the public for free on his website. Nowadays, I help set up molecular gastronomy teams in universities all around the world and promote note-by note-cooking as well.
So what exactly is molecular gastronomy and note-by-note cooking?
Simple: molecular gastronomy is a scientific activity, where we look at the mechanisms that occur when one cooks. For example, if a cake expands during cooking, we ask the question 'why?', and we study it with the scientific method in the hopes of making a scientific discovery. Note-by-note cooking is 'synthetic cooking' where instead of using vegetables, meat, eggs or flour, we make dishes with pure, edible compounds created in the lab. The goal is not to reproduce carrots or beef, but to make new food with different consistencies and flavours that have never been tasted before.
Creating new food?
Let me explain it differently. In a carrot, for example, you have compounds such as water, cellulose, pectins, sugars, amino acids, minerals, vitamins, colorants and odorant compounds. In chicken, you mainly have water, proteins and fats. In these traditional ingredients, the compounds are naturally organised into cell structures cells. But, if you have all these compounds separately, you can rearrange them in billions of ways! This creates an infinite number of dishes that never existed before. This is important because new flavours can be created that we've never encountered and also ensures food security.
How does that ensure food security?
As the head of the Human Department of the French Academy of Agriculture, I know that we have a huge problem of feeding people sustainably. Today, we are seven billion people and we'll be 10 billion in the future, but we can only feed about six billion. Fighting spoilage has to be the main solution. Then the next question is, why is there spoilage? There are many reasons, but transporting fresh produce is one key issue. They are damaged during transportation but instead you fractionate them at the farm, you avoid some spoilage. You avoid transporting water – a tomato is 95% water! – and make a lot of energy savings. This is already done today, where milk and wheat are cracked or fractionated by the food industry.
How can we apply molecular gastronomy and note-by-note cooking in Singapore?
I hope that a molecular gastronomy laboratory that's active in scientific research is created in Singapore. I hope that note-by-note cooking is spread to chefs in order to make the technical component of cooking easier and I want to promote the idea that knowledge is very important. Singapore cuisine is primarily a question of art – art here does not mean 'beautiful to see', but rather beautiful to eat. Culinary art has to focus on flavour, not the ingredients or the appearance and that's where note-by-note cooking can help.
You prepared Singapore's first ever note-by-note dinner, tell us more about the dishes.
The dinner starts with a trio of snacks: Do, a dumpling made from different starches with fruity aromatics added to it, Re a crispy 'chip' sprinkled with dry salted egg yolk and an aromatic called, Poppé, which makes you think of popcorn and Mi, note-by-note bread dough made using starch and proteins and filled with vegetable cellulose. The Sea of Change is a Xiamen-inspired oyster pancake created using pure starch and a flavoured gel that captures the taste of the sea. Most interestingly is the Lioness Head, a meatball made from gluten peppered with Sfumo to enhance the smoky taste of grilled meat. It's served with carrot cake made from white radish fibre and a green leek fashioned from agar and flavoured with hertzon. Sharks no longer need to be hunted thanks to the Save the Shark soup. Shark's fin is made using agar and the soup makes use of dry seafood extract and an evocation of mushroom.
Find out more about professor Hervé This here.