2000s Archive

The Gastronauts

Originally Published October 2001
We've been cooking like cavemen since man first found fire. But with scientists invading the kitchen, reports Daniel Zwerdling, all that is about to change.

For a group intent on nothing less than changing the course of culinary history, the foodophiles gathered in the ancient Sicilian mountain town of Erice are a rather odd crowd. Here's a Michelin one-star chef from Britain who makes ice cream out of foie gras and kickboxes to keep in shape for the kitchen. Over there is a physicist from the University of Bristol who has a penchant for shirts emblazoned with pictures of penguins. A 300-pound restaurateur from Philadelphia stands nearby, his arms a mass of tattoos. At the moment, they and a throng of assorted chemists, food industry scientists, and cookbook writers are huddled together beneath the weathered brick arches of a 15th-century monastery, where they are taking turns prodding soggy slices of eggplant in a frying pan.

They all have the same questions: If you salt and drain eggplant before you fry it, will that prevent it from soaking up oil, as cookbooks sometimes suggest? And will that make the eggplant less bitter, which many cookbooks suggest? The participants agree there's another question that's almost more important, at least in the spirit of this unusual conference: What are the scientific reasons why?

Welcome to the fifth International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy, dedicated to the proposition that if you teach chefs more about the science of protein strings and hydrogen bonding, they'll be able to take their art to higher levels.

"Most chefs have no scientific background … none," says Jean Matricon. His rebellious white hair, bushy beard, and red suspenders make him look like a cross between a nuclear scientist and an Amish farmer; in fact, he's a noted French physicist who has spent decades trying to develop dramatic new ways of conducting electricity at super-low temperatures. At the moment, though, he's more enthralled with these slabs of eggplant. "Even the great chefs learned to cook by being told what to do, by following tradition, and by trial and error, but they don't understand why things happen," Matricon says. "They're too proud to ask."

One of the impromptu lab assistants, British food writer, broadcaster, and novelist Leslie Forbes, has just finished measuring the olive oil left in the pans after frying. She summarizes the laboratory method: Sliced eggplants half an inch thick. Salted them and drained one hour. Squeezed off beads of liquid. Fried slices in 20 milliliters of olive oil.

The results are striking: The salted slices have absorbed only a fraction of a teaspoon of oil. They taste fresh and light yet almost meaty, with a touch of spring to them and the faintest crackling of a crust. But the unsalted slices are greasy and limp. They've soaked up almost all the olive oil.

"This is pretty much what I expected," says a man who looks as if he might teach Shakespeare in college—and the throng looks to tweedy, bearded Harold McGee for an explanation. Just about everyone at this conference will tell you that McGee profoundly affected their culinary lives back in 1984, when he published his landmark On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. McGee unearthed extensive laboratory evidence, which was essentially hidden away in academic and food industry journals, and used it to demolish some of the cherished myths of the kitchen. He's probably most famous for shattering the axiom that searing meat "seals in the juices"

At the moment, McGee is deconstructing the eggplant—which makes me nervous, since I got a C in chemistry. McGee, though, has a way of turning science into plain English. "Eggplants tend to soak up oil basically because they're constructed like sponges," he says. "Their cells contain water, but there are lots of big air pockets between the cells." And those air pockets are all-important: When you cook the eggplant, the heat squeezes the air out of those pockets, so they become like millions of empty containers—and the oil oozes into them.

When you salt eggplants before you cook them, McGee says, the salt draws water out of the cells, so the cells collapse (it has to do with positive and negative ions, but that's getting too scientific). In turn, the air pockets between the cells collapse—so there are no more empty containers to soak up the oil.

Now you know the answer: Salt works wonders on eggplant. So does any method that punctures the cells and those air pockets—in fact, McGee says he cooks eggplant slices for a few minutes in a microwave before he fries them, and it accomplishes the same thing.

And forget the canard about drawing out the bitterness. If the eggplant is bitter, any water you draw out will contain some of that bitterness, but there's so much water still left inside the eggplant that you won't taste the difference. "If you start with bitter eggplant," McGee says, "you'll end with bitter eggplant." The scientists around him nod and harrumph.

The one-star chef from Britain nudges me and raises his eyebrows toward McGee. "That man changed my life," he says. "And my cooking."

Tomorrow, everyone will regroup for the next workshop topic: Can bakers apply chaos theory—which mathematicians use to study the origins of the universe—to learn how to get better air bubbles in a baba au rhum?

First, let's take a break.

The international workshop on Molecular Gastronomy might never have been organized if it weren't for World War II, the atomic bomb, and a frustrated magazine editor in Paris.

Back in the 1930s, a brilliant Jewish physicist named Nicholas Kurti left Europe a step ahead of the Nazis. He ended up in Los Alamos working on the U.S. government's secret project to develop the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People who confront disaster and dying in their work often have an acute zest for living, and Kurti went on to become an irrepressible gourmet. More than that: He became passionate about the idea that scientists spend too much time investigating arcane mysteries at the fringes of the cosmos when they could be using their genius to make life more pleasurable here on earth.

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