Culinairy Arts Blog Cooking with Love & Science An insight into molecular gastronomy

Before learning how to cook, we should know what cooking really is. Of course, technique is important - we have to know how to break an egg, how to roast chickens, how to make mayonnaise sauce, etc. but technique alone does not make a dish. The same for piano playing - you may know how to put your fingers on the keys, but if you don't know how to play the keys in order, there is no song. Hence, art is first, and technique second. Is cooking an art and technique? No, because well swollen soufflés, with all the finest ingredients in them, thrown at the face of the guests are not "good". The dish is prepared for someone very particular, and some "love" has to be given. "Love"? The term seems unscientific, but everybody understands what it means - a simple sandwich shared with very good friends can be a delicious meal, but a very well prepared meal shared with enemies is not good. Therefore, cooking in less about art & technique, and more about love. Love given by the cook, and love shared with the other guests is what make a meal good. Have can you give love in creating dishes or in organizing meals to be shared between many guests? Coming back to learning, culinary technique should be learned in the perspective of giving love, and culinary art should be learned according to the same idea. Let's consider technique first. Much like other crafts, cooking is applying processes in order to control your outcomes. For example, mayonnaise is produced by dispersing oil in the water of egg yolks and vinegar. The oil has to be poured slowly, the whisk has to be moved with enough energy so that dispersion occurs. During the process of mayonnaise making, a lot of physical and chemical phenomena occur. Oil is divided into tiny droplets that are covered by some particular molecules from the yolk (proteins, lecithins, etc.), and energy is consumed in the oil droplets division and is transformed into heat. When learning how to cook, it is useful to understand the result of the actions (phenomena) and to study the relationship between what the cook does and the physical and chemical phenomena resulting from what he or she does. Always remember , "The head should drive the hands". Chemistry in the kitchen? Physics in the kitchen? This is not new, as even Marie-Antoine Carême, arguably the most famous of all French cooks, wrote in the first page of the first volume of his treatise L'art de la cuisine française, in 1847: "Women care about the pot, without knowing any chemistry; they only learnt from their mother how to do it. First they put meat in an earth pot, adding the necessary water (two litres of water for three ponds of beef meat); then they put the pot at the corner of the fire and, without knowing it, they make a chemical process. The pot heats slowly, heat of water increasing gradually, and dilating the muscular fibres of beef, so that it dissolves the gelatinous matter that is between them. By this way, with slow heat, scum is floating up slowly; osmazome, which is the tastiest part of meat, dissolving slowly, gives some unction to the liquid, and albumin, which is the scum producing part of muscles, dilates easily, goes up forming light scum. Thus, by the simple process of slow heating, the women obtain a nutritive and tasty stock, as well as a good and tender boiled meat".Carême was not the first to speak of chemistry in cooking, as Marin also wrote in La suite des donsde Comus: "Cook's science is to dissociate, digest and quintessence meat, to draw from them nutritious and light juices. This kind of chemical analysis is indeed the main part of our art". Here we can appreciate that there is a direct relationship between cooking, chemistry and physics. However, cooking is more than just science. It is a craft made possible through love and the exploration of the mechanisms of phenomena.