The creator of “molecular gastronomy” explains a 200-year-old recipe for suckling pig and foresees dishes constructed from the basic chemicals of food.
Can an understanding of science improve our cooking?
There will never be science in the home. Science takes place in the lab. That produces knowledge, and if you use that knowledge when you cook then it becomes technique and technology.
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How did you get into the science of cooking?
I was making a Roquefort soufflé for friends on Sunday 16 March 1980. The recipe said to make a béchamel sauce then add the egg yolks two by two. I am a rational man, so I added the yolks all together. The soufflé was a failure. The next Sunday I made the soufflé again and added the egg yolks one by one – and it was better. The next day I didn’t go to work but I began my notebook. The first sentence was: “I understand there are old wives’ tales in the kitchen and I will collect them and test them.”
Do many more of these odd cooking practices turn out to be scientifically valid?
In 1994, in front of 150 guests, I carried out an experiment where I cooked four suckling pigs from the same family in the same way. A 200-year-old recipe said that cutting the pig’s head off after it was cooked would make the crackling crispier. This is an example of a myth that seems wrong but is right.
The mechanism is that when you roast the pig, the heat is evaporating from the surface and this makes the skin crisp. But at the same time, a lot of vapour accumulates in the body and this is lost immediately when you cut off the head. If you don’t cut it off, the vapour is forced through the skin and softens it.
What was your most surprising scientific invention?
Chemical formulations are very useful: I formulated the CDS (complex dispersal system) in 2001, which describes any colloidal system. Most foods are a colloidal system: one substance is dispersed in another to produce a gel or a foam. We are gels – water trapped in a solid network of muscular fibres – and we eat mostly gels.
What will we eat in the future?
No one knows. But I have proposed a new method called note-by-note cooking, which is like playing the piano – assembling dishes note by note, using compounds like sucrose, salt, ethanol, tartaric acid. A chef made the first note-by-note dish in Hong Kong this year without plant tissue or meat, using reverse osmosis and fractionation to create compounds, building the dish in layers to include firmness, hardness, softness, stickiness, pungency and flavour. The political idea behind it is that if we want to get a better environment we have to help the farmers to behave more correctly, and in order to do that they have to get richer by adding value. So instead of growing and selling carrots, they need to create compounds from them.
What do you think of Heston Blumenthal?
His cooking is fun, and that’s important to keep the guests happy. What you need for cooking is love, art and technique. Technique is easy, art is harder and love is the most important.
Profile
Hervé This edited the French edition of Scientific American before moving to the French Academy of Sciences. He created the concept of molecular gastronomy in 1988. His latest book is The Science of the Oven
