IN&OUT OF THE KITCHEN – NOTE BY NOTE
A NEW NOTE After molecular gastronomy, what’s next? French scientist Hervé This believes it’s note by note cooking.
AN EXAMPLE: THE CHERRY According to iqemusu.com, the cherry has a consistency directly linked with pectin and cellulose, which form a network where water is imprisoned, creating the pulp. The cherry has a smell, joining of hundred of odorant compounds. These compounds have a major role, since the smell takes part to the taste. In fact, when they arrive in the mouth, they are vaporized and sent into our nasal cavity by the respiration. Our brain interprets this nasal stimulus as part of the taste. The cherry also has a taste, which can be defined by everything captured by the taste buds of the tongue, and also spicy and fresh tastes which are called trigeminal sensations. These compounds are not just present in the cherry but also in other products in different proportions. For example, the compound Amerise is shared by the cherry, scallop, strawberry, almonds…there is a common base of compounds for all products. For This, in the future where we will cook not with products, but with compounds. This is what is called note by note.
CHEFS ARE ALREADY ON BOARD Pierre Gagnaire was the first, to be exact. The first tests of note by note dishes were first done privately in his personal kitchen and then publicly in the restaurant of Pierre Gagnaire. In 2008, the first dish note by note was born. Today, Camastra’s Senses in Warsaw, by Italian Chef Andrea Camastra, is the first restaurant entirely devoted to note by note cuisine.
FOR MORE… If you’d like to find out more, pick up a copy of Hervé This’ book, “Note-by-Note Cooking: The Future of Food.”
Hervé This WHO IS HERVÉ THIS? He may not be as famous as his co-creator Ferran Adria, but he is the co-creator and the scientific brain of molecular gastronomy. A French physico-chemist who is passionate about gourmet food, he led to the understanding of molecular gastronomy in 1988, which studies the physicochemical transformations of foods during the cooking process. With this study developed a new culinary discipline: molecular cuisine.
HOW IT STARTED It started with a question in 1995: “Why not use pure compounds in the kitchen?” Note by note was born: Pure compounds are assembled to create new flavours and textures that never existed.
COOKING IS NOT UNLIKE MUSIC According to This, “Until the 20th century, musicians only had brasses, woodwinds and strings to compose masterpieces. Nevertheless, they were still not able to create the music they had in mind and therefore, they tried to answer the fundamental questions: How is sound created? Scientific work, especially Fourier’s had paved the way for an answer: sound, or sound waves are made of several sinusoidal waves, characterised by a frequency and an amplitude. Keeping what they had learned in mind, they started to create sound out of nothing simply by adding pure sinusoidal waves. Thus was born the synthesizer, with which it now possible to produce any sound, whether it is the sound of an acoustic instrument or a completely new sound. However, it is noteworthy that electronic music did not replace traditional music, but simply expanded its universe.”
Chef Andrea Camastra WWW.WORLDCHEFS.ORG
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