Compound Dish

Molecular gastronomy has been one upped by a French chemist and a French chef based in Hong Kong. This is pretty fascinating stuff in you have an interest in chemistry or all things food.

From The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Hong Kong...

The luxurious Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong seemed like an unlikely place to launch a revolution but on 20 April 2009, the Michelin-starred Pierre restaurant made dining history with the introduction of ‘Note à Note’ – widely claimed as the world’s first dish made entirely of pure compounds.

Created by French chemist Hervé This [the father of molecular gastronomy] and renowned chef Pierre Gagnaire ‘Note à Note’ consists of jelly-like ‘pearls’ with a taste reminiscent of apple, similar in texture to tapioca pearls. These pearls are served with an iced granité that tastes a little like lemon, with a wafer-thin ‘caramel’ crisp in between. No apples, lemons or caramel were used in cooking the dish.

A combination of pure compounds such as ascorbic acid, glucose, citric acid and a few grams of a substance known as maltitol, ‘Note à Note’ was created by analyzing basic ingredients to discover their key component chemicals and then using only those compounds to create a new dish.

“This is the first time in the history of cooking that we are able to make a dish compound by compound,” said Hervé This. “All food is made from compounds but in the past we had no way of separating them and selecting only the ones that interest us. The reason this was done was in order to give chefs an entirely new freedom and a new way of cooking. This is post-molecular gastronomy and it will revolutionise the way we look at food and cooking. Tomorrow's chefs will frown upon plain vegetables, such as carrots, he says, and will instead use the molecules which make up carrots — caroteniods, pectins, fructose and glucuronic acid.”

I wonder how long before we get to...