Foodie voodoo: Molecular gastronomy at home

BY KIM KNIGHT

From flavour-exploding spheres to fancy jellies and foams, molecular gastronomy has brought theatre to restaurants around the world. Is it just foodie voodoo – and should home cooks embrace the trend? Kim Knight gives it a go.

The most surprising thing about my molecular gastronomy experiment? The number of people I knew with access to scales that could measure powdered goods to within 0.1 of a gram.

"Once your drug dealer has ripped you off a few times, you start to see them as a sound investment," said one acquaintance. "Just kidding," she added.

But eight hours into my quest to turn watermelon to caviar and olive oil to crumbs, I wondered if it would have been easier to manufacture methamphetamine.

Calcium chloride? Yep, said the nice man at Total Lab. "But we can't supply it for human consumption. It's designed for plant tissue cultures."

Maltodextrin? Present in plenty of high-performance energy supplements – but not on the supermarket shelf.

An anionic polysaccharide from the cells of brown algae capable of absorbing 200 times its own weight in water? Also known as alginate. Also unexpectedly hard to find.

Liquid pea ravioli and frozen parmesan air. Carbonated mojito spheres and restructured onions. Soya sauce foam. Maybe there was a good reason my mum never taught me to make this stuff.

"Any home cook who wants to do this is either borderline psychotic or has too much time on their hands," said Simon Thomsen, international guest judge at last week's Cuisine Restaurant of the Year awards.

"Sometimes in all this experimentation, you get a lot of exclamation-mark food, which is all very clever and smart, but it's a bit like using too many words in a sentence. You lose the meaning, it's too overwrought... as you dine, you have an intellectual reaction to the food, rather than an emotional and gut reaction."

Why was I bothering? Blame this whole sorry story on an eatery called Vue de Monde.

Four weeks ago, at the much-lauded Melbourne restaurant, I was presented with something they called a salad. Little bits and pieces of raw vege, sprinkled with what looked like parmesan cheese, which, once in my mouth, melted sublimely, surreally and absolutely addictively, back to pure olive oil.

I wanted to try that at home.

I found a transcript of an Australian television interview with the restaurant's head chef, Shannon Bennett: "We have to make sure that Vue de Monde is the experience you can't produce at home."

Fair suck of the (spherical) sav, mate – how hard could gastronomical gimmickry really be?

Broadly defined as the scientific study of physical and chemical processes that occur while cooking, molecular gastronomy was fathered by European scientists Nicholas Kurti and Herve This. Famous exponents include Spain's Ferran Adria (who recently announced he was closing his restaurant El Bulli) and Heston Blumenthal from the United Kingdom's Fat Duck.

It's the movement that popularised food foams and bubbles, that led to chefs using liquid nitrogen and seaweed to deconstruct the familiar and reconstruct the extraordinary. It is also, according to recent media reports, completely dead.

"Turning everything into a caviar is going to have a limited shelf life," Simon Thomsen says. "It's a bit like being a comedian. There are jokes you can tell once. But once the audience knows the punchline... "

Part of the problem, says food writer and MasterChef judge Ray McVinnie, is what the term molecular gastronomy has come to mean.

Watch experts like Ferran Adria, he says, "and you will see there is an integral and deeply philosophical idea behind it".

"He is trying to look at food in a different way, by rearranging it in ways that haven't been done before."

An example: a dish needs rosemary. But instead of adding the pungent herb to the dish, Adria gives the diner a sprig to sniff.

"He is creating a completely new sensory experience of food."

McVinnie, who counts seafood in seawater jelly by an El Bulli-trained chef among the finest dishes he has eaten, says too many New Zealand restaurants have become "derivative followers" of the trend.

"It is not just a matter of accessorising the food you already do with things like foams and spheres. You have to know what you're doing... People still have this idea that molecular gastronomy is fashionable. Well, it's not. It's just not. It's not if it's bad. If it's good, it's simply just good cooking."

McVinnie had officially burst my watermelon bubble – before I'd even built it.

Because here's the thing. I did, eventually, track down the calcium chloride I needed to make the simple water bath that would turn my alginate-mixed melon juice into a "caviar" which would burst in my mouth.

Hawkins Watt Limited, Auckland-based specialist ingredients company, supplies to the food industry in minimum 25kg lots. I needed exactly 2.5g to make cantaloupe caviar. Graeme Nealie, business development manager and carrot caviar fan, says he's fielded more than one call from the curious home cook. "It's a fashion thing. Food styles and flavours come and go. The technology will always be there, but this sudden flush of molecular gastronomy that was being pushed from El Bulli in Spain will just go back to being an ordinary part of the chef's repertoire."

Yes, yes. Where can I get some alginate?

Enter Simon Gault. Turns out the other MasterChef judge (who says they don't cast reality television shows for dramatic tension?) sells it online. Log on to souschef.co.nz and you too can buy Albert and Ferran Adria-branded versions of the seaweeds, gums, vegetable cellulose, dextrins and calcium salts I had been scouring supermarkets, breweries and health food stores to find. (Word to the wise: the methyl cellulose I mail ordered from a book repair shop in Warkworth did not turn out to be as edible as the stuff Gault sells to make spaghetti strands from liquefied vegetables.)

Gault says critics of molecular gastronomy are "generally the people who don't know how to do it".

And although he says it's about bringing theatre to the food, he'll also push the health benefits.

"You want to thicken something? You might use cornflour or a roux of butter and flour. Cornflour changes the taste, and you've got to cook the flour out. Using Xantana [xanthan gum], hey presto, you can thicken something without changing the flavour format and using no butter, and to me that's awesome."

There's more. But when he says he'll send me a mini spherification kit, and I confide I've bought some smoke flavouring from a home brewing shop and I'm very excited about the possibility of mixing it with water to make a sphere to serve on top of steak, he stops. He sighs.

"You could do that. But you'd never eat it. It would just be like smokey water. It would just be horrible. Take this phone number. Call Euro."

Dear reader: the death of the sphere has been greatly – and unfairly – exaggerated. The trick, say the chefs at Euro, is to employ science to create something that is not just clever but is also good to eat.

Example one: A little Texturas Malto (the tapioca maltodextrin that started this story) added to anchovy oil, and mixed with crisp crumbs, creates an alternately melty-crunchy topping that elevates ordinary macaroni cheese to something you want to eat in a restaurant.

Example two: There are plenty of recipes for whizz-bang liquid olives on the internet, but Euro was the first place where I saw the puree blended with a smokey sauce – and a chef insert a pistachio nut into the olive's centre.

"With all the experimenting we do, it's important it still tastes like an olive," said Euro pastry chef Rob Hope-Ede.

A deconstructed Caesar salad is fine, says head chef Carl Maunder, "But if it's not better than a Caesar salad, then what are we doing? Just playing around."

I nibble on an eggless meringue pineapple cloud (actually, there's a local vegan food company called Angel Food that nailed something like this a few years back and now supplies marshmallow and meringue cookie mixes around the world), while Hope-Ede turns Chambord black raspberry liqueur into a sphere. He pops it on to a ginger creme brulee and tops it with a sweet foam. Gimmicky? A little bit. Delicious? Absolutely.

"Some call it food voodoo. There are purists who hate it. But I really enjoy it. The possibilities are endless and your imagination is the limit."

Footnote: Last week, in my home kitchen, I took a perfectly round melon. I deconstructed it back to juice. And then I took a syringe and recreated it. Drop by painstaking drop. Tiny, perfectly round spheres of cantaloupe caviar. They popped in my mouth and they tasted like melon. They were, technically, a total success. But to be honest, the rhubarb, orange and lime cake I helped bake the same week for my partner's mum's birthday was much, much better.

Thinking local

How many smears and spheres at the country's hottest restaurant?

"We actually don't do any," says Bevan Smith, owner and chef at Riverstone Kitchen, the Waitaki eatery last week named Cuisine Restaurant of the Year.

Smith, who says his four-year-old business began life as a "tin shed in the middle of a paddock" is, in foodie parlance, a "locovore".

But the chef who most recently worked at Brisbane's acclaimed e'cco bistro says eating local and seasonal is as much a practical choice as a philosophy.

"Some people do it for fashion. For us, we were lucky. Those jersey benne potatoes everybody loves at Christmas really are just down the road."

Riverstone Kitchen is 12km from Oamaru and although the Waitaki Valley is growing a reputation as a food basket, Smith says there are challenges sourcing food in the rural South Island.

If he wants local beef, for example, he has to buy the whole beast to keep it cost effective for producers. "Cows don't come with 100% rib-eye."

Last year, the restaurant took 100 whole lambs and split them into racks, tenderloins, shanks, chump cuts, and shoulders. The brisket and flaps were slow cooked for ragu sauce.

"It opens your eyes to different possibilities when you're using the whole animal," Smith says.

Local growers, he says, can be convinced to try new crops  if there's a market. "They can plant fennel, but when we only need 2kg a week ... if nobody buys it, they're better off to plant broccoli."

Riverstone's August menu features the likes of lamb with cavolo nero (a kind of cabbage grown in the restaurant garden) and beef with cauliflower gratin.

Smith says molecular gastronomy is "an interesting thing to have a look at, but it's not something we get into. In the right environment, it's amazing  but when you get people who don't know much, a little bit of information is sometimes dangerous in the wrong hands".

How would lychee foam go down in the Waitaki? "I think people would just walk straight past it."

The next big thing

On your plate, the perfect tomato and mozzarella salad: Close your eyes. Breathe in. Basil? Olive oil? Sun on fresh dirt? OK, says Simon Gault, so that's a bit far-fetched – but technically, the $23,000 machine he is importing to his Auckland restaurant, Euro, could be capable of distilling the very essence of dirt. It's called a rotary evaporator. And the MasterChef judge says, with it "the world is limitless". "Basically, it makes perfume." The machine evaporates liquids under vacuum, extracting aromas and flavour molecules quickly, gently and at much lower temperatures than normally required to produce an extract. Imagine the essence of basil, says Gault. "It's completely clear, it looks like water, but it's intense basil. I could smear that on a plate, or put a few drops on a soup, or make a jelly. "Some people don't like sauce with a dish. They just like a lovely piece of chicken. But if I smear some of this liquid on, they get `sauce'." Gault says Euro will be the first New Zealand restaurant to use a rotary evaporator, and diners will be able to experience the technology from October, when a refit allows him to open a separate kitchen which will seat just 12 people, and offer a fine-dining experience. "I've owned a bunch of restaurants, but I'm more excited about this than anything I've done before."

The deconstructed cocktail party

The Polish graphic designer took one look at my deconstructed cocktail party and said: "No thanks. I like vodka."

"It is vodka," I said, brightly.

"Yes," he said, turning his back.

Molecular gastronomists need a skin as thick as a spherical olive. On today's menu: liquid olives and solid vodka, lime and tonics.

Ooh, aah, but what's the point?

"To re-excite people about food," I said. Doggedly.

"I never lost my excitement," growled the reporter who has covered coups in Fiji and tsunami in Samoa. "I get excited three times a day."

Some surprise findings: People who weren't big olive fans loved the reconstituted version. People who hadn't had sherbet since they were six, renewed their affair with fizz.

I realised that if I were hosting a dinner party, I'd just put olives and pistachio nuts on the coffee table and concentrate my efforts on the food that needed a knife and fork. And – despite Heston Blumenthal's assertion that the two flavours are complementary – the caramelised cauliflower and chocolate jelly was just too weird for me.

Spherical olives: as demonstrated by Rob Hope-Ede, Euro, Auckland

To create a liquid-centred olive with a gel exterior, blend 3.2g Texturas algin with 500g of water, rest in fridge overnight. Puree pitted green olives; mix with chipotle-smoked tabasco sauce to taste. Blend 500ml of olive liquid with 15g Texturas gluco, rest at least two hours to allow air bubbles to collapse. Fill a deep, teaspoon-sized measuring spoon with olive mix, push a shelled pistachio nut into the centre until it's covered. Carefully pour the spoonful into the algin bath. Make sure it's completely covered, leave for one minute, lift out with slotted spoon and place in water bath to rinse off algin. Store in olive oil.

(I made up the full algin mix, but easily halved the olive component, substituting chipotle for the smoked garlic sauce I found in the back of the fridge, and adding a bit of hot water to make the mix more liquid. Dropping it into the algin bath requires a steady hand, with a slight turn of the wrist at the last minute.)

Solid vodka & tonic: adapted from a free recipe on molecular gastronomy website kyhmos.org

To create a jellied vodka square topped with sherbet fizz, make up 250g total of vodka and tonic water to taste. Stir in 0.9g of agar. Bring to boil over medium heat, stirring continuously, remove from heat. Pour into a square container to a depth of 1cm, leave to set. To serve, cut squares and place on fresh or dehydrated slices of lime. Just before eating, spoon on "fizz" made by combining equal parts baking soda, citric acid and icing sugar. The Texturas Surprises range includes a solid squiggle of product simply called "fizzy" that also does the trick. You could also use gelatine for the jellies (follow the instructions on the pack), but agar is vegetarian and stays firm at room temperature.

The molecular gastronomist's grocery list:some common ingredients

For jellies: agar (from red algae) and gellan (fermentation of the bacteria sphingomonas elodea)

For foams: lecithin (commercially produced from soya bean) For solidifying fats: tapioca maltodextrin

For thickening: xanthan gum

For stabilising foams and forming elastic gels: methyl cellulose (from cellulose-rich plants)

For spherification: sodium alginate (from brown algae) and calcium chloride

Recipes and ingredients: www.souschef.co.nz (Texturas stockists); www.ingredientstop.co.nz; blog.khymos.org

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