1. Acc Chem Res. 2009 May 19;42(5):575-83. doi: 10.1021/ar8002078.
Molecular gastronomy, a scientific look at cooking.
This H(1).
Author information:
(1)INRA Team of Molecular Gastronomy, UMR 214 INRA/AgroParisTech, 16 rue Claude
Bernard, 75005 Paris, France. herve.this@paris.inra.fr
Food preparation is such a routine activity that we often do not question the
process. For example, why do we cook as we do? Why do we eat certain foods and
avoid other perfectly edible ingredients? To help answer these questions, it is
extremely important to study the chemical changes that food undergoes during
preparation; even simply cutting a vegetable can lead to enzymatic reactions.
For many years, these molecular transformations were neglected by the food
science field. In 1988, the scientific discipline called "molecular gastronomy"
was created, and the field is now developing in many countries. Its many
applications fall into two categories. First, there are technology applications
for restaurants, for homes, or even for the food industry. In particular,
molecular gastronomy has led to "molecular cooking", a way of food preparation
that uses "new" tools, ingredients, and methods. According to a British culinary
magazine, the three "top chefs" of the world employ elements of molecular
cooking. Second, there are educational applications of molecular gastronomy: new
insights into the culinary processes have led to new culinary curricula for
chefs in many countries such as France, Canada, Italy, and Finland, as well as
educational programs in schools. In this Account, we focus on science, explain
why molecular gastronomy had to be created, and consider its tools, concepts,
and results. Within the field, conceptual tools have been developed in order to
make the necessary studies. The emphasis is on two important parts of recipes:
culinary definitions (describing the objective of recipes) and culinary
"precisions" (information that includes old wives' tales, methods, tips, and
proverbs, for example). As for any science, the main objective of molecular
gastronomy is, of course, the discovery of new phenomena and new mechanisms.
This explains why culinary precisions are so important: cooks of the past could
see, but not interpret, phenomena that awaited scientific studies. For French
cuisine alone, more than 25,000 culinary precisions have been collected since
1980. The study of the organization of dishes was improved by the introduction
of a formalism called "complex disperse systems/nonperiodical organization of
space" (CDS/NPOS). CDS describes the colloidal materials from which the parts of
a dish are made; NPOS provides an overall description of a dish. This formalism
has proven useful for the study of both scientific (examining phenomena to
arrive at a mechanism) and technological (using the results of science to
improve technique) applications. For example, it can be used to describe the
physical structure of dishes (science) but also to examine the characteristics
of classical French sauces (technology). Many questions still remain in the
field of molecular gastronomy. For example, one "Holy Grail" of the field is the
prediction of physical, biological, chemical, and organoleptic properties of
systems from their CDS/NPOS formula. Another issue to be worked out is the
relationship between compound migration in food and chemical modifications of
those migrating compounds. These questions will likely keep scientists busy in
the near future.
DOI: 10.1021/ar8002078
PMID: 19449900
