Molecular cuisine, or How to turn almond into cheese
Mariana Puzderi/ Chișinău / Moldova.ORG / -- Nowadays, molecular cuisine is one of the most popular areas of gastronomy. For preparing meals with unusual flavor combinations are used refrigerators that can cool products immediately to minus 260 degrees Celsius and centrifuges, grinding ingredients to molecular components. The trendsetters of this new culinary fashion are chefs who work under the laws of chemistry and physics, turning almonds into cheese, foaming meat and making beet ice cream.
Meals with a scientific approach
The founder of the molecular movement is the French chemist Hervé This, who created a drink, artificially, which is not distinguishable by taste of high-end whiskeys. According to This, manipulating molecular structures can help to diversify and improve the quality of the products not only in professional kitchens, but also at home.
The first successful molecular gastronomy meals are named after famous scientists. For example, Gibbs (egg whites with sugar and olive oil in a gel form), Waklen (fruit foam), Bame (egg, cooked in alcohol).
The cook preparing "molecular meals", uses a variety of tools and appliances that heat, cool, mix, chop, measure the mass, temperature and acid-base balance, filter, create vacuum and inject pressure. Techniques such as carbonation or enrichment of carbon dioxide (carbonation), emulsification (mixing of suspended solids), spherization (create liquid spheres), vacuum distillation (separation of alcohol) are most often used in molecular gastronomy .
Culinary experiments
The term "molecular gastronomy" does not accurately reflect the essence of the cooking process, because the cook does not work with individual molecules but the chemical composition and aggregated state of products. In recent decades, Chemistry and Physics have especially been tightly associated with cooking, but the foundation of all modern knowledge in this field were laid many centuries ago and became universal alredy.
The most comprehensive definition of molecular gastronomy gave it's devotee, the Catalan chef Ferran Adria. In his view, molecular cuisine - is not an attempt to feed the audience with incredible nonsense and shock the conservative gourmet, but an "approach to cooking based on knowledge of basic science, summarizing various culinary phenomena that occurred throughout the history of the gastronomic art, and modern innovation Technology ".
Ferran Adria is one of the best chefs in the world. The cook is co-owner of the famous Spanish restaurant "El Bulli" in which he has worked since the age of 22. Adria is also known as the creator of "culinary foam". The compulsory chef menu consists of mushrooms foam, beet foam, and meat foam. Together with a young assistant, Daniel Picard, Adrià has made transformation of almond into cheese and asparagus into bread using only natural ingredients.
In Russia there are also cooks who prepare meals in molecular design. Chef and restaurateur, Anatoly Komm, is the unofficial head of Russia's molecular gastronomy. In April 2011, Comme's restaurant, "Barbarians", in Moscow was included in the prestigious list of top 50 restaurants in the world, according to San Pellegrino. No other Russian restaurant can boast such an achievement.
Thanks to Comm, the lovers of elite cuisine understood that meals which recently seemed so common the Soviet cuisine ( Russian salad, Olivier, herring "under fur coat") can find the most unpredictable and technically perfect form. The cook can carry the tradition of molecular gastronomy on Russian earth.
The guests of the "Barbarians" restaurant are offered a gastronomic set-play on Russian themes. Comm serves pelmeni as crystal balls, inside which is hidden fragrant spiced minced meat, surrounded by pink horseradish and beets ice cream. The Ukrainian borscht becomes translucent beet soup, in which swim two red balls in pink foam sour cream emulsion (one - with a vivid taste of smoked bacon, the other - of bone marrow).
Comments