Rare metals

These are some gorgeous pictures I found on tumblr. These are naturally occurring crystal formations. 

Bismuth

Flourite

Azurite/ Malachite

Pietrisite

Hafnium

Molecular gastronomy - where food and lab meet

Chemistry is a big part of our lives, even if we don’t realize it. Mixing ingredients, putting them in the oven and getting a completely new thing is actually a very complex reaction. But beyond just the science of food there’s the search of many chefs to be ahead of times when it comes to cooking, and molecular gastronomy is a very controversial and different type of cooking.  

Fruit caviar 

Hervé This and Nicholas Kurti felt the need to investigate cooking in a different way. Both had scientific background but a love of food and cooking, and most important, curiosity about what happens when you cook. They are the fathers of molecular gastronomy as a research area, which is different from food science, it takes advantage of many scientific principles used there but on a smaller scale, such as the use of emulsifiers. Molecular gastronomy could be considered a branch of food science, but food science is concerned with analysing the chemical makeup of food and developing methods to process food on a large scale.  

The term has now been adopted to describe a style of cuisine. Many have incorporated unconventional ingredients to their cooking to bring different textures and flavours to their creations. Pictured above is a ‘fruit caviar’ which was first developed by Ferran Adrià, the chef of El Bulli Restaurant in Catalonia, Spain. The technique is known as spherification, which involves making liquid-filled beads that explode in the mouth. Spherification relies on a simple gelling reaction between calcium chloride and alginate, a gum like substance extracted from brown seaweed.  Chef Adrià is one of the most important names in molecular gastronomy, as well as Chef Heston Blumenthal from London’s ‘TheFat Duck’, pictured bellow.

Chef Heston Blumenthal

Using liquid nitrogen to achieve fluid-filled fare is another popular technique. When food is exposed to extremely low temperatures it will be frozen on the surface, liquid in the centre. The technique is typically used to develop semi frozen desserts. It is also common for molecular gastronomists to play with food flavours, making very strange flavour combinations, such as strawberry and coriander, pineapple and blue cheese, and cauliflower (caramelized) and cocoa. They have learned that foods sharing similar volatile molecules -- those that leave food as a vapour in a similar way -- taste good when eaten together.

Many other techniques are used in this style of cuisine, such as making foams by using hydrocolloids or carbon dioxide, thermal immersion circulator for sous-vide (low temperature cooking), food dehydration, using syringes to inject fillings, amongst others.

Even though this style of cooking is popular to date, there has been plenty of controversy around it. Some people think the additives are unhealthy and some ingredients have been banned in countries like Italy. There has also been controversy when it comes to the name, some chefs don’t want to be associated with the name “Molecular gastronomy” and some do. And also, very important representatives of this type of cuisine have distanced themselves lately from this style of cuisine; chef Ferran Adrià announced that he will close his restaurant.  If you are against or in favour of this type of cooking, one thing can be agreed, molecular gastronomy shows how science and cooking can go hand in hand to create new things. It brings the lab to our tables and can satisfy the curiosity of a lot of people. Is the movement dead? It’s too early to tell, this young style of cooking might only be evolving. 

Personally, I am very curious about it, being a chemist and all, I really want to go to a molecular gastronomy restaurant, which I haven't been able to do, plus, I would love to get my hands on some of the equipment to make my own little master pieces at home, the kits can be found on Amazon.