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STREWN ACROSS THE WORKBENCH are vacuum jars; an ultrasonic mixer; reflux columns; a scattering of glass separators; some thermal baths; a canister of liquid nitrogen; and even the odd mass spectrometer. But this isn't a science laboratory. From the lush mouth-watering aromas and sizzling sounds in the background, you can immediately tell it's a kitchen – one where the staple tools of scientific endeavour are being co-opted to produce novel dishes for some of the world's most fêted restaurants.

There's a whole new movement in the world of food, in which chefs are collaborating with research scientists to teach themselves the chemistry and physics of cuisine – taking their culinary reactions back to first principles. Armed with this knowledge, and a load of high-tech gear, they are cooking up scientific storms in some of the most famous kitchens across the globe.

Even academics are getting excited about the results. "I don't understand how anyone can cook without such kit," exclaims Peter Barham, a physicist at Bristol University in England. Colin Osborne of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London is also enthused: these chefs "are using unusual methods to produce exciting dishes that would be impossible without modern science," he says.

You may wonder what's wrong with our long-established culinary traditions. The thing is, many culturally ingrained cooking methods are simply sub-optimal – or just plain wrong. Osborne gives the example of frying meat to seal in moisture: weighing it reveals that moisture is actually lost in the process.

Another example is the age-old technique of adding salt to boiling vegetables, the idea being to raise the water's boiling point and thus cook the vegetables faster. In fact, the amount of salt we would typically add won't raise the temperature significantly – or improve the flavour, since only a miniscule amount is absorbed.

Hervé This, director of the Molecular Gastronomy team at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Paris, spends much of his time trying to disprove these culinary old wives' tales. Since 1980, This has collected more than 20,000 examples of these culinary proverbs in French cookery books alone. In some of his research, he works alongside Parisian chef, Pierre Gagnaire – whose restaurant is ranked fourth in world by the U.K.'s Restaurant Magazine.

Examples of the questions This is tackling include whether it's better to add vinaigrette to potato salad while the potatoes are still hot, and whether mayonnaise fails when made by a woman who is menstruating. One by one, he is empirically testing these folkloric adages – and disproving the more absurd (the answer to the latter is unequivocally 'no').

French foodie Hervé This (right), shown here with chef Pierre Gagnaire, has disproved many culinary old wives' tales by testing them empirically. (Image: Jacques Gavard)

It's seriously important work, says Barham. "If you understand what's going on in cooking, you'll be better equipped to improve it."

He contends that it's difficult to get good results from cookbooks, because recipes are typically poorly written. Think of the number of times you've followed a recipe to the letter, only to have it turn out too sloppy, crunchy or otherwise less than optimal. In stark contrast, Barham notes, scientific papers are subject to peer review, whereby experts pore over experiments to ensure they can be accurately reproduced.

He cites a recipe for a roast that calls for 20 minutes cooking time, plus another 20 minutes for every kilogram of meat – the meat is cooked when the centre has reached around 55°C. In reality, though, when you double the thickness of a roast it takes four times as long to cook through, and nine times as long when you treble the thickness.

"The cooking time depends on the square of the thinnest dimension of the meat and not the weight," Barham stresses. "Use the cookbook and you'll either have a large raw joint or a small burnt one. Use physics and you'll have perfectly cooked meat."

IN PURSUIT OF INSIGHTS into scientific cuisine – dubbed 'molecular gastronomy' by some – I braved a crackly phone line to speak to This in his Paris laboratory. An affable man with a booming French accent, he's clearly passionate about getting more chefs interested in science.

"The first modern chemists used kitchen equipment to do their experiments," he tells me. "Since then chemistry has undergone massive changes – but cooking methods have remained largely as they were in the Middle Ages." Since cooking involves so much chemistry, This argues it's illogical that we haven't applied more scientific know-how and equipment to the problem.

For example, he says, a classic method in chemistry is liquid-liquid separation. "Take two solvents, oil and water, add them into a glass bulb with cinnamon and shake it." The flavour compounds then split into oil- and water-soluble components and you get two new flavours, the sum of which we recognise as cinnamon. It's these kinds of innovative methods that are giving chefs new tools with which to play.

This regularly publishes papers in journals such as Angewandte Chemie (German for 'applied chemistry') and the British Journal of Nutrition on his findings. Current projects in his lab are testing the best ways to make stock and the colour chemistry of vegetables. He is also attempting to create a standard language to precisely describe the physical qualities of food and even formulae to annotate 'culinary reactions'.

This is not the only one promoting a new approach to cooking. Bristol University's Peter Barham, collaborates with leading British chef Heston Blumenthal, proprietor of The Fat Duck in the village of Bray, Berkshire – one of the select few restaurants to rate a full three stars in the prestigious Michelin Red Guide. The restaurant is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, serving delightfully unexpected dishes such as nitro-scrambled egg and bacon ice cream, and oyster and passionfruit jelly with lavender.

And though some of the dishes may sound gimmicky, this innovative approach to cooking is paying off. El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain – directed by chef Ferran Adrià – is another leading restaurant enthusiastically engaging with science and enjoying a surge of popularity as a consequence. It's only open for six months of the year (to allow six months for research and development), yet is rumoured to be booked out for an entire year in advance. And in the 2007 list of the world's 50 best restaurants, published by the U.K.'s Restaurant Magazine, El Bulli was ranked numero uno, with The Fat Duck coming in second (see www.theworlds50best.com).

The approach is also creating quite a stir beyond Europe, in the U.S. and Australia. Sydney's Tetsuya's restaurant is ranked fifth on Restaurant Magazine's global hit-list, and Bentley and Marque (both in the trendy Surry Hills area) are also serving up innovative science-based fare. (See reviews, below.)

The research that This and his fellow molecular gastronomists are carrying out has helped us understand, for example, that heat from below produces the best soufflés (steam pushes the mixture up, causing it to rise, says This). Some chefs are using liquid nitrogen to produce wonderfully creamy-textured ice cream in seconds, encapsulating liquids in membrane-bound caviar-like spheres or freezing oils into powders to be sprinkled over dishes.

Thermal baths allow eggs to be cooked at the ideal temperature for both the protein-rich white and fat-rich yolk to coagulate sufficiently, without the development of the green-grey layer caused when hydrogen sulphide reacts with iron in the proteins. The optimal temperature lies somewhere around 65°C, but different consistencies can be achieved to suit personal tastes by slow cooking at between 61°C and 68°C.

Blumenthal has even worked with scientists using mass spectrometry to analyse the flavour profiles of various foods. The results have led to unusual creations (mango and Douglas-fir purée or poached salmon with liquorice jelly, anyone?) in which shared aromatic compounds make seemingly odd combinations work.

The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, caters for those with adventurous tastebuds. Who would have thought sardine on toast sorbet (pictured) would work? (Image: The Fat Duck)

LATE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD physicist Nicholas Kurti once quipped that "It's a sad reflection that we know better the temperature inside the stars than inside a soufflé." It was Kurti who came up with the term 'molecular gastronomy' during the 1980s, working in collaboration with This. The pair devised the moniker to describe the science of "culinary transformations and eating phenomena," and differentiate it from food science, which was more focussed on the chemical make-up of food and manufacturing processes.

"Twenty years ago the worlds of science and cooking were neatly compartmentalised," agrees author Harold McGee, one of the top food science writers in the U.S. and a former Yale University academic. "There was food science: an applied science mainly concerned with understanding the materials and process of industrial manufacturing. And there was the world of small-scale home and restaurant cooking, traditional crafts that had never attracted much scientific attention."

A lot has changed in the two decades or so since he published his seminal book on the topic, On Food and Cooking. In a revised 20th anniversary edition, McGee says that the book was "riding a rising wave of general interest in food, a wave that grew and grew, and knocked down the barriers between science and cooking, especially in the last decade. Science has found its way into the kitchen, and cooking into laboratories."

Today, This is involved in organising a plethora of courses and workshops to promote molecular gastronomy. The crowning glory is the workshop devised with Kurti in the 1990s, and still held in Erice, Sicily, every two years. It brings together the top scientists and chefs in the field, including Blumenthal, for a brainstorming session. This believes that many cooks at home and in restaurants are beginning to abandon historical misconceptions and adopt better methods based on empirical evidence.

Barham says that Blumenthal first approached him to enquire about the veracity of the 'adding salt to boiling vegetables' myth around ten years ago. Following that, he visited Barham regularly to learn more about the science of cooking. He discovered that much of the equipment in the lab might also be useful in the kitchen.

"It was a journey of discovery that took me down many strange roads, and into a world of centrifuges and digital probes, vac-pacs and liquid nitrogen," says Blumenthal in his 2006 book, In Search of Perfection.

"If physicists and chemists could use science and technology to unlock the secrets of the universe, I reasoned, then surely I could enlist their help for something as humble as refining my techniques in the kitchen."

Since then Blumenthal, now aged 40 (and instantly recognisable for his bald head and geek-chic spectacles), has come a long way. His restaurant has become one of only two in Britain awarded three Michelin stars, and the man himself has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading, and an OBE (Order of the British Empire) from the Queen. He has collaborated with the U.K.'s Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) on a course of quirky kitchen science distributed to schools in Britain, in an attempt to enliven kids' interest in chemistry.

In 2006 the RSC bestowed an honorary fellowship on him for creative applications of science to cooking. On giving the honour, the incumbent president of the RSC, Simon Campbell, said: "The scientific community admires and respects the research that Mr Blumenthal has performed to harness cuisine to science. Through his inquisitive and innovative approach to food he has underlined spectacularly how chemistry permeates all aspects of texture, taste and smell."

In London's Observer, Blumenthal (who has written columns for several newspapers) recently decried the 'molecular gastronomy' label as elitist. However, he's still an advocate of using science to create pioneering taste sensations.

SO WHAT DOES the future hold? Rachel Edwards-Stuart is a graduate student co-sponsored for her PhD by Blumenthal and Andy Taylor, a flavour technologist at the University of Nottingham in England. She divides her time between the lab and The Fat Duck restaurant and is studying some remarkable food additives that would not be out of place in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

These include modified cellulose gels that solidify on heating and melt again as they are cooled. The idea is to make dishes that develop into different flavours as they are eaten. One application so far has been to make a stew of lentils with tiny cubes of balsamic vinegar jelly that slowly break down in the mouth.

Her other project is creating drinks that change flavour. "The concept came from… Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Willy Wonka makes a bubble gum that is a whole meal in one sweet," she says.

Though her lab attempted to do a similar thing – create confectionary in which different flavours were perceived one after the other – it proved difficult to control the consistent release of a sequence of flavours.

"This is why we are now doing it in a drink, where the release of flavours is much easier to control because the process of drinking is much more similar between people than the process of eating." Unfortunately, Edwards-Stuart was unable to tell me more, due to a confidentiality agreement with the restaurant.

While the likes of This, Blumenthal and Edwards-Stuart are the pioneers, the next phase will be to bring science into our kitchens at home. Already there are books that will give you insight into the wondrous chemistry that turns humble ingredients into cuisine (see "Food for thought", below). And as the movement grows it may not be long before we see pipettes, flasks and maybe the odd centrifuge on sale next to carving knives, rolling pins and pressure cookers.