Bacon and Egg Flavoured Ice-Cream. Sound Cool?

 

Well this is just one of the dishes created through the combination of science and cooking, or molecular gastronomy, which seeks to explore culinary possibilities and challenge the sensory properties of food, such as flavour, aroma and texture, through the investigation of physical and chemical processes that occur while cooking. This style of cuisine frequently involves liquid nitrogen, water baths and rotary evaporators, more commonly found in a science laboratory rather than a kitchen, to create unusual recipes like the aforementioned breakfast flavoured dessert or snail porridge.

Note-by-note cooking takes this approach to the next level.

Whereas molecular gastronomy uses scientific techniques to induce weird and wonderful chemical and physical transformations in traditional ingredients, note by note cuisine involves preparing food directly from the basic constituent chemicals themselves i.e. the individual flavour notes that comprise the dishes. The first ever note-by-note dish featured jelly pearls that tasted like apple, lemon sorbet and a wafer-thin caramel strip. However, no apple, lemon or caramel was used to flavour the dish.

To create such a dish, you first have to understand the chemicals that give foods their taste, structure and aroma, using laboratory techniques such as mass spectrometry to identify the constituent parts. For example, methional, a flavour compound that tastes like potato, and 2-methyl-3-furanthiol, which gives the taste of chicken, can be synthesised in the laboratory and then combined, along with any desired nutrients, and cooked to make an edible Sunday roast.

The concept goes beyond simply trying to create interesting flavoured and textured foods. With a rising global population and a food chain burdened by ethical, environmental and economic concerns, attempts to engineer alternative, sustainable foods that overcome the issue are currently being investigated, such as artificial eggs made from plant proteins to replicate the taste of real eggs, without a chicken ever coming close to the production process. Of course, this brings a new angle to the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Author - Paul Clingan

Photo credits: Dom Davies