Iconoclastic French chef Pierre Gagnaire claims to have created the world's first entirely synthetic gourmet dish - a starter of jelly balls in apple and lemon flavours that are creamy on the inside and crisp on the outside. Delicious eh?
So what’s synthetic food? No idea - but I think it’s making nosh from chemical compounds – you remember those jars in the science lab – no – not the ones with the dead frogs in them!
His main course, following the jelly balls, is a tad more traditional. Lobster fricassée, served with polyphenol sauce, made of tartaric acid, glucose and polyphenols. I can just see the worried looks on the faces of his diners, who will be forking out (if you excuse the pun) a couple of hundred euros for the privilege, when they see, ‘accompanied by a polyphenol jus’.
Now good old Gagnaire is not a Heston Blumenthal, although he is a multi Michelin 3-star chef. Where Blumenthal actually takes food ingredients and tries to extract the maximum flavour from them and then mixes those flavours together in strange combinations, Gagnaire is trying to do away with food altogether, or so it seems.
Sorry – that’s not correct – what you eat is food. What he’s trying to do away with are the normal ingredients – the meat and two veg!
Foodie commentators, following this culinary experiment, have stated that in this brave new world, chefs will shun vegetables altogether, such as carrots (I can hear kids the world over cheering already), but will use the molecules which make up carrots — caroteniods, pectins, fructose and glucuronic acid - instead. And I suppose at the end of the process we’ll end up with something orange which tastes like a carrot! Now all he needs to do is start work on broccoli and I’ll be a fan.
I can see it now – instead of the waiter flambéing your crèpes suzettes in a large frying pan at the side of your table, he’ll pour some ingredients from half a dozen lab jars into a lab flask and mix them around. He’ll set it onto a Bunsen burner and ask you how you want your compound cooked!
The day the Midi in the village starts to go down this route, I’ll slit my wrists!
Link to Gagnaire’s famous Parisien restaurant, Rue Balzac, is below – he even looks like a nutty professor!
http://www.pierre-gagnaire.com/index-fr.htm
1 comment:
Molecular gastronomy is like HUGE over here!... It's crazyyy expensive too... My dad went to a restaurant that specialized in molecular food, and he got a "deconstructed glass of wine." It was all the components on a plate...he was nottt pleased :)
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