Photo by Sektormedia/Flickr CC
Three days later the congress was drawing to a close, and over 50 chefs from all over the world had taken their turn onstage. I couldn't help but feel a bit empty. Where were the culinary fireworks? The introduction to the next ingredient that was going to enable us to turn oil into powder, serve a gelled liquid hot, or thicken an infusion by simply blending in a magical white substance? Where were the explanations of new techniques? Like the ones used to create raviolis with skins made from themselves, making pasta from stock, and aerating food to produce sponge-like textures? Surely someone was ready with the next method of changing texture and form, like the liquid nitrogen that became popular in the professional kitchen five years ago? Where were the equivalents to the freeze-drying machines? Centrifuges? Rotary evaporators? Vacuum sealers?
The lack of inspiration led me to compare this congress to the previous years. As I continued to write the laundry list of ideas that weren't present at this year's congress, the defining elements of the genre of modern cooking -- let's call it molecular gastronomy, just to fuel the fire -- became more and more clear. What also became clear is that it is tough to label, name, or define anything without establishing its starting and ending points.
This was a revelation for the modern chef. Suddenly we had a seemingly endless source of inspiration at our disposal.It is premature to me to declare the end of this cooking style, or even the micro pocket of creative focus contained within it. It is also incredibly presumptuous for me declare anything about the identity of fine cooking -- even though it seems the practitioners are the most qualified to do so, because of their intimate knowledge of the subject. Historically, it has always been the scholars, the public, and the media who have had the responsibility to describe the precise meaning, characteristics, and bookends of a period, whether it is in the arts, politics, industry or otherwise.
So rather than speak for everyone in the gastronomic universe, I will explain what is going on in my head and in my restaurant in terms of the shifting of thought processes, frustrations we have with the creative avenues of the past eight years, and how all of this is encouraging us to look at other ways to create new paths to help us evolve and innovate.
When I look closely at the creative paths that have catapulted modern cooking into popularity and controversy in recent times, a few seem to have become the defining elements. The most popular seems to be looking to industrial mass food production for inspiration. Large companies specializing in packaged ready-to-eat foods, candies, cereals, and beverages spend millions of dollars on research and development each year to improve or develop new products. They look to science to help them do anything from suspending beads of gel in a sweet beverage to creating an edible veneer to help seasoning adhere to chicken breasts to figuring out a way to pack a powerful breath-freshening burst of mint in a strip of film smaller than a postage stamp only to have it disappear as soon as it hits your tongue.
As consumers we thrive on these innovative products. I would say we not only accept but in fact demand them with our hard-earned paychecks. With some catchy marketing and a creative slant, companies fulfill the desires of the public while generating tons of money.
People frequently ask me,"Where do you come up with stuff?" or "How did you think of that?" My answer is always the same. My passion is cooking and food. Everything I experience I relates back to those two things. So when I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket that has a liquid center of gel, I wonder how it was produced and if I can create a similar sensation at Alinea. I am certainly not the only one who thinks this way, and it is obvious to me that this is how the use of hydrocolloids, modified starches, gums, pectin, and other such ingredients found their way into the professional chef's kitchen.
This was a revelation for the modern chef. Suddenly we had a seemingly endless source of inspiration at our disposal. We had a pantry of ingredients that could do the impossible, transforming ingredients in ways never before possible.
It was difficult to see this at the time, but the breadth of this wave was quite narrow. When you really look at the techniques critically, the results are all versions of textural transformation involving liquids.
But what happens when the wow factor of a hot gelatin wears off? Or the mystery of how a liquid creates a wrapper from itself, its walls gelling to hold the still aqueous center inside? We roll into variations of themes. Flavors of self-encapsulations run the gamut from sweet to savory and back, from being the stand-alone focus of a dish to merely a hidden component. Textural manipulations are manipulated; new "raviolis" are deep-fried, carbonated, and dehydrated. But once the iterations and the extensions have been explored to their peak, creativity slows and eventually stops, until a new source of inspiration is found -- the source I kept waiting for in Madrid.
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I'll agree with this post that the "thrill" might be gone. But at the same time, I don't think Achatz gives himself enough credit here. Alinea doesn't strike me as an establishment that gets thrill from "the gimmick"--whether it be a carbonated sphere or puree cooked on an anti-grill. It's more about new information to the equation to refine it...the value added of Achatz's knowledge and preferences in food/tastes.
And while there might not be a new base equation this year, there is always more and more information. For example, the culinary arts seems to be just at the beginings of exploring the physical science behind flavor pairings....like here http://khymos.org/pairings.php.
A very brilliant strategy actually:
1. Accept the term and all it’s associations as framework
2. Leave that now solidified framework behind and with it, the term
3. Establish a new framework and, as the creator, become the leader by default
1 bird, 3 stones, more probability of hitting bird.
Like a new brand sold by the same company, that is automatically free of association.
I don't really know where this movement of "new wave" style cooking is going. I have talked to a few chefs who have said that nothing more can be done so it was was a short run, and i have talked to chefs who have said it's only the beginning. But when you think about it, a couple years ago when some of these incredible discoveries were just emerging, people thought that there was no where to go, and every year something new was discovered. I agree that after you do all the textural manipulations, what more is there to do? You could maybe look at how food effects you mentally, say the golden ratio. Is there a certain ratio on a plate that makes it perfect? If you place food on the plate with certain ratios, will it affect how it tastes and your thoughts on it without it being obvious? Also there is the question of new dining experiences, or interactive dining experiences. But i think that in this day in time, people are more akin to go to restaurants that are flashy but do not step over the line. Can restaurants "step over the line"?
I also think that so much was accomplished in such a short amount of time compared to all the other style of cooking, that people need to get accustomed to cooking with liquid nitrogen, and popping "raviolis" on the roof of their mouth. Now a days, you see more avant-guarde restaurants opening up in big cities. Once people are used to it, then it might start getting boring for them. But i don't think that the customers are bored, i think that the chefs are bored. Chefs are one if the most curious people there are, but you have to be curious to be a chef. If you weren't curious, then new discoveries would never come. There are a whole new generation of chefs to step up the bar, famous or not.
The problem is, the innovations from molecular gastronomy haven't filtered down the middle and low-end restaurant. I was surprised a few months ago when I stopped by a local pizza joint here in Downtown LA and the consulting chef at the time was featuring sous-vide short rib for $15 a plate! Appalled to see sous-vide applied at such a low price range, I asked to see how they were doing it. I went down to the basement kitchen and saw that he was sous-viding a variety of meals to be sold at very reasonable prices.
Of course, sous-vide is hardly an innovation from the past 8 years, but that experience showed me that people have to catch on with these techniques at the lower level for them to have any weight. Think of anything in gourmet food. McDonald's started featuring espresso drinks and 100% arabica coffee, and customers are starting to see the difference it makes. Though I might faint if I ever saw an emulsion or gel on something at Mickey D's, I think the problem is that none of the innovations (beside the dreaded 'foam') hasn't hit the mainstream.
The fact that The Bazaar in Los Angeles is starting to make many of these dishes and techniques available at a low price range is perhaps a revelation. One could theoretically order $20-30 worth of small plates and go home (though he/she won't be very full). That lower entry into modern cooking is the key to its success across the culinary spectrum.
At this point, rather than trying to be the bleeding edge of where modern cooking can go, how about trying to make it accessible to the average person? Only then will they appreciate the true innovation.
Restaurant cooking has just undergone the most rapid period of technological innovation it may ever have been through. A slowdown was inevitable. But the lessons of this movement go beyond "textural transformations of liquids". As was said above, an obvious contribution is the discovery of hitherto unexplored flavor pairings due to the underlying composition of foods. Think of the Fat Duck's "Foie Gras Benzaldehyde", white chocolate and caviar, or a host of dishes coming out of WD-50. A chef that realizes that vanilla makes things taste sweeter and composes a dish using this knowledge to her advantage is following in the spirit of this movement. Has the transfer of ideas from industry to the restaurant slowed down? Surely yes, it had to. Is the movement dead? Of course not. Perhaps a slow down in inspiration is a good thing; the worst excesses of this movement have lead to some scary meals in my life. Innovation is a good thing, but so too is time for refinement.
For me, it's about learning a new technique, like braising a tough cut of meat or rolling out a beautiful sheet of pasta. Simple cooking skills that I learned in my kitchen years ago, and I'll always have on hand.
I'm not going to place sodium alginate "fruit caviar" on every dessert I make, or whip up a Heinz 57 "foam" for my nephew's steak (although that sounds good!), but I love knowing how to make them.
I'm thrilled to look through my old recipes and rethink each ingredient, each step, inspired because I get to recreate a favorite dish.
I've been to The Bazaar by Jose Andres several (as of this writing six) times and my favorite dishes are the foods that trigger a childhood memory. The caramel popcorn bites cooked in liquid nitrogen, the chicken croquette that looks like a tater tot (but tastes like chicken pot pie), the cotton candy foie gras that's rolled in crushed corn nuts. I hadn't had traditional caramel popcorn or cotton candy since I was a kid, and if it wasn't for this modern or molecular cooking, I wouldn't have cared.
this is my first post and I would like to thank you for your amazing blog. I am a neuroscientist, but have a great interest if food. I have to say that I was never taken by the molecular gastronomy movement, in terms of what Adria does, which to me is more on the presentation and textural side of things. I am interested in the side of flavour pairings and flavour perception, ideas from food science we can use in everyday life for eating healthier and tastier food. sous vide is one of those ideas for example, that if made cheaper can change everyday life eating (still cannot believe someone has not made a $200-300 home kitchen setup).
I think you all make great points, jsewitz and mattatouille in particular.
I find very fascinating the ability of pioneering restaurants like El Bulli and Alinea to concoct not only new tastes, textures, and aromas, but also creative and inspiring ways of eating, serving, and being served (I just read chefg's post on latex/silicone service). This too, along with the nostalgia-generating techniques emphasized by chefs like Heston Blumenthal and many others is very clearly another important component of __________ Gastronomy and the movement surrounding it.
It is also encouraging that the potential for these kinds of innovations is not limited to top restaurants, but also to lower-end restaurants and, indeed, non-restaurants.
For example, there is an "artscience" institute in Paris called Le Laboratoire ( http://www.lelaboratoire.org/ ), which has done some very interesting work regarding new forms of eating. They recently released LE WHIF, a small and simple device that provides for the tasting of inhaled aerosolized "calorie-free" chocolate powders. I've tasted it. While the flavors themselves are nothing new, the idea of inhalation as a method for food/flavor delivery is truly fascinating.
I've heard that the people at Le Laboratoire are currently working on another, somewhat similar technique. They vaporize/aerosolize liquids into a fog, which is then also inhaled. Apparently, it has very few if any flavor limitations, and presents an opportunity for a multitude of applications. Would anyone be interested in a chocolate-flavored mist pairing with their flourless chocolate cake?
FYI, this last device is called LE WHAF, and a friend of mine had the opportunity to try it out at the Cannes Film Festival last month. He said he"whaffed" some sort of ginger-lemon-whiskey concoction and thought it was really something different.
Could this be a part of the future we are looking for here?