A Floating Lab Explores the Fringes of Science and Gastronomy
Damien Marsic
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Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/809.full
Vol. 340 no. 6134 p. 809
DOI: 10.1126/science.340.6134.809
A Floating Lab Explores the Fringes of Science and Gastronomy
It's just one of many experiments at the Nordic Food Lab, which Reade, a chef with a degree in gastronomic sciences, leads. Housed on a small boat in the harbor here and connected to Noma, a nearby, world-famous restaurant, the lab employs cooks and scientists to develop new cooking techniques and mouth-watering new dishes. They're investigating how well bee larvae go with granola (very well) or what happens when garlic cloves sealed and stored for weeks at 60°C turn black. (Among other things, the enzyme alliinase, which produces garlic's pungent compounds, stops working).
Whether people like Reade are actually doing science is a point of debate. Occasionally, results are published—as in a recent paper about seaweeds and umami flavor—but the work is "not driven by wanting to discover something," says University of Copenhagen food scientist Per Møller. "It is more that if a problem arises they consult with whatever scientific field is necessary." Still, labs like this can help him and other scientists, for instance by creating the unusual dishes needed in experiments to test how expectations modify the perception of taste, Møller says: "If somebody comes up with a creation that really freaks out your nervous system, you get a stronger signal." Chefs like Reade "are also asking questions and doing experiments that are opening up new questions for basic science," says Harold McGee, an American author who has explored the interplay between science and cooking.
The Nordic Food Lab is part of a movement known as molecular gastronomy that started in the 1990s as a project to understand how ingredients are transformed during cooking. Pioneers like French physical chemist Hervé This were advocating a new, evidence-based way of cooking. "They thought it strange that we know more about what goes on in the nucleus of a star thousands of light-years away than about what goes on in a soufflé," Møller says. But they also wanted to introduce new tools and methods—and invent new recipes.
Indeed, renowned chefs started using professional laboratory equipment such as water baths, liquid nitrogen, and rotary evaporators to produce radically new dishes. Ferran Adrià's restaurant El Bulli in Spain, voted the world's best restaurant five times between 2002 and 2009 by Restaurant magazine, became the beacon of this new, science-inspired cuisine. Reade says research at the Nordic Food Lab, which opened in 2008, is ultimately driven by the "pursuit of deliciousness." As one researcher at the lab put it in a recent paper, "if it's not delicious yet, experiment and play with it until something interesting happens."
The approach has proven successful from a gastronomic and business point of view. Noma dethroned El Bulli as the world's best restaurant in 2010, a position it held on to until last month. Its popular $260 menu currently features items like live shrimp and fermented pears. The restaurant also serves ground grasshoppers, and the Nordic Food Lab is experimenting with other ways of preparing insects—which scientists say could provide an abundant and green protein source (see p. 794). "Very few of them," Reade observes, "are concentrating on making recipes that are delicious."