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Molecular Gastronomy is the primary source for a term that has since been used to describe almost everything except what Hervé This actually meant by it.
This is a French physical chemist who coined the term molecular gastronomy in 1988 together with Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti. Kurti had previously observed that science knew more about the temperature inside a star than it did about the temperature inside a soufflé, and their joint project was intended to remedy precisely that. The point was never foams, spherification or nitrogen on the plate, but to investigate what actually happens physically and chemically when food is cooked.
The book grew out of his columns for the journal Pour la Science and consists of short chapters, each testing a particular claim. Why a soufflé rises and why it falls. What makes mayonnaise split and what happens if you keep whisking anyway. Whether searing really seals the juices into meat, which it does not. Whether salt in the cooking water makes any difference, whether stock improves if it cooks for longer, whether the wine in a stew contributes anything after an hour on the hob.
This has also worked closely with Pierre Gagnaire for many years, which means that the reasoning consistently ends up in the kitchen rather than the laboratory.
It should be said plainly that this is not a cookbook. There are no recipes to follow, no techniques to master and no ingredients to order. It is popular science about cooking, published by a university press, and it requires you to be interested in the question itself.
For anyone who is, however, it is difficult to get around. Most of what was subsequently written about the science of cooking rests on this work.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 392
Language: English
First published: 2002 in French, this English edition 2008
