SHAUN SMITH • writer

The sixth in a daily series that looks back this month at work I published in the first decade of the 21st century.

In September 2008 I had the opportunity to interview two of the world’s greatest chefs: Ferran Adrià, chef-owner of elBulli restaurant in Roses, Spain, and Heston Blumenthal, chef-owner of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England. Each of them had new cookbooks out that fall and I had been commissioned by CBC Arts Online to write about how these two chefs approached cooking. (You can see the full text of those interviews here and here.) Below is the CBC article, which (to the best of my knowledge) was the first full-fledged article about food as an art form to have been published on CBC Arts Online. — Shaun Smith, December 6, 2009

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Don’t try this at home — Originally published on CBC Arts Online, January 5, 2009

“It is a lie,” asserts Spanish chef Ferran Adria, co-owner of elBulli restaurant. We are chatting about molecular gastronomy. Adria is in Toronto to promote his long-awaited cookbook, A Day at elBulli, a 600-page tome about the history and inner workings of his famed three-Michelin-star restaurant near the town of Roses, north of Barcelona.

But the man who is routinely tagged by his peers and critics as the world’s greatest chef also has another mission today. Many people call Adria the father of molecular gastronomy, which is perceived as an avant-garde style of cooking that has revolutionized restaurant food by employing unusual scientific techniques, equipment and materials. The only problem is, not only does Adria reject the label, he holds that the movement itself is a fallacy. “Everybody says I am the initiator, the creator of a new cuisine,” says Adria, “but I never worked with science or scientists until 2004. The concept for my cuisine was created between 1994 and 1997.”

Adria, 46, has cooked at elBulli since 1983 and has been a co-owner of the restaurant since 1990. Along with a detailed account of his development and cooking philosophy, A Day at elBulli offers over 1,200 photographs that follow him and his team from the laboratories where they invent new dishes to the kitchen and dining room of elBulli. It also contains some of the most complex recipes ever conceived.

Diners at elBulli experience a 30-course tasting menu of small, tapas-style dishes created from recipes that quite often require 50 to 70 steps to complete. These recipes also use innovative cooking processes, such as liquid nitrogen freezing, dehydration, spherification (the sealing of liquefied ingredients in delicate algin gum bubbles), freeze drying, aroma infusion, sous vide (slow cooking in vacuum-sealed bags submersed in hot-water baths) and the creation of flavoured foams called “airs.”

Adria’s creative process is driven by multiple forces, ranging from the availability of new materials and appliances to philosophical movements such as deconstructivism and minimalism to a desire to play off familiar cultural references. In one elBulli recipe, called simply “Earthy,” he reduces ingredients such as licorice, truffle, beet, potato and peanut into pure, yet thematically linked flavours that have been processed into unfamiliar formations such as cubes, foams, and jellies. In others, using the spherification technique, what appear to be green olives and mozzarella balls literally pop on the tongue, releasing liquid flavour.

While such cooking may seem revolutionary — if not downright bizarre — Adria insists that this is simply a progression in the culinary arts. It builds on what came before, exploiting new technologies and techniques to delight diners — just as generations of master chefs have done for centuries. Pointing out that all cooking is a product of science, Adria states: “The dialogue between cooking and science is creating a better, more improved cuisine, but not necessarily a new cuisine.”

He is not alone in this opinion. In December 2006, Adria teamed up with two other Michelin three-star chefs, both also frequently labelled molecular gastronomists: Heston Blumenthal, owner of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, and Thomas Keller, owner of The French Laundry restaurant, in Napa Valley. Along with renowned food writer Harold McGee, they published a “statement on the ‘new cookery’” in England’s Observer newspaper, declaring: “the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking.”

Blumenthal, 42, republished that statement this fall in his own volume: The Big Fat Duck Cookbook. “What happened over the past 10 years is that there was this new wave of cooking developing,” Blumenthal said in a recent phone interview, “which is an evolution or extension of nouvelle cuisine and what happened in cooking through the 1980s. And I suppose that there was at one point a need to pigeonhole it and give it a title, so ‘molecular gastronomy’ was used to try to understand what it does. But it is not a particular style of cooking.”

Blumenthal’s cookbook, a massive, slip-cased volume weighing 4.5 kilograms and selling for $275, tells the history of his restaurant and of his personal obsession with food science and sensory experience. His recipes rival Adria’s for their complexity, and at times surpass them in eccentricity. For example, one Blumenthal dish turns a British breakfast classic into a dessert by serving liquid nitrogen-frozen egg-custard ice cream with dehydrated candied bacon and caramelized brioche. Most startling about the dish is that it is prepared tableside at The Fat Duck using eggs that have had their fillings removed and replaced with the custard. A waiter cracks the egg into a cold frying pan and pours the liquid nitrogen over them to “cook” the scrambled-egg ice cream.

Another dish, called “Sound of the Sea,” visually replicates a stretch of seashore on a glass platter, offering shellfish, seaweed and foamed fish stock atop a strip of edible “sand” formed with panko breadcrumbs and N-Zorbit M tapioca maltodextrin. It comes with an iPod tucked inside a seashell, allowing diners to listen to crashing waves and seagulls as they eat.

To concoct such startling dishes, Blumenthal explores not only the physics and chemistry of cooking, but also the physiology of human sensory stimulation to better understand our reactions to food. To comprehend why people enjoy painfully spicy curry, for example, Blumenthal once injected his head chef with chili oil, and then put him into an MRI machine to observe the effects on the brain.

“Why not embrace technology when we’re cooking?” argues Blumenthal, whose obsessiveness about scientific matters has spawned two British television series: Kitchen Chemistry and In Search of Perfection. “As long as technology does not become the end in itself — it is the tool, just like the kettle or knife or food processor.”

Adria and Blumenthal’s unusual cooking stems from a desire to engage in a creative interplay between their own emotions and the expectations of diners. “When I eat something new — something that I make — I get very excited,” says Adria, “but I might also be an idiot to think of serving that to people. There’ll be a lot of things that people will not necessarily accept. The simple answer is: what I want to convey is what I feel, and the menu at elBulli is like a poem. Sometimes it kills, sometimes people fall in love, sometimes it makes you think. Some years there’s no sense of humour. It changes and varies.”

For Blumenthal, continued exploration of human physiology is key. “The single most important ingredient is the brain,” he states. “Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and for me to tap into that is the main thrust of my cooking. I want diners to come away with a real sense of fun.”

And what of their readers? Should just anyone be able to prepare dinner from these new cookbooks? “No,” Blumenthal states unabashedly, “this is definitely not The Fat Duck at home. This [book] represents almost 14 years of work and research. It is the story of The Fat Duck and the recipes are 100 per cent exactly how we do them here.”

Adria puts an even finer point on it. “We are in a state of confusion right now, with people trying to make haute cuisine at home,” he says. “When I buy a book about architecture, I don’t intend to build houses. We don’t buy books on painting with the intention of painting like Picasso. People buy these cookbooks not because they intend to cook with them, but because they love gastronomy.”

Then again, there’s nothing stopping anyone from trying. But if you do manage to turn your home kitchen into a laboratory stocked with liquid nitrogen, N-Zorbit M tapioca maltodextrin and algin gum, just remember: don’t call the results of your culinary experiments “molecular gastronomy.”