He was out to produce as many as 20 new dishes, many based on local ingredients, for his quarterly gala dinner. Asked if he was aware of the controversy over shark-finning, in which fishermen hack off the animal's dorsal and pectoral fins and toss it back into the sea to die, Robuchon shrugged. As many as million sharks are estimated to be dying every year to feed demand for fins, a fact that drove environmentalists to mount a relentless attack on the Disney Corporation over Hong Kong Disneyland's now-discarded plan to serve shark's fin soup at elite wedding banquets.
Asked for the recipe, Robuchon replies, "Ah, no, it is a secret. But it will not be in a soup, it will be cooked in the French way. It will go onto the menu if I think we will keep the ones that are received best by the guests. And so, mes cher amis, when the gala dinner was served on May 27, there it was: L'Aileron de Reqin en croustille, petite fleur de capucine et feuelles de coriander en tempura. Shark's fin served with tiny crusty nasturtium flowers and coriander leaves in a tempura batter.
Robuchon is expanding his operations in the Pearl River neighborhood. In partnership with Alan Ho, the nephew of casino supremo Stanley Ho, he will open a new restaurant, his tenth, in Hong Kong in October. He won't reveal many details this far in advance of unveiling the new spot in the Landmark office complex in Central, although it is to be another edition of his acclaimed L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, four of which already exist in Paris, New York, Las Vegas and Tokyo.
The master chef came out of retirement with a drastic change in style from haute cuisine to open the L'Atelier chain, called by Conde Nast Traveler "the world's best coffee shop cum sushi or tapas bar," with counter-only service and no reservations. It is la cuisine de verite, mange la verite. It is a way of cooking that is very fast and very easy, and the product has to be perfect.
The concept will be based on the idea that the consumer will want a kind of proof cuisine, they will want to see the product, they want to taste it, they want to recognize it.
They want it to be cooked in a way so that you can feel the very taste of the product. Simplicity and truth. L'Atelier is about as far away as possible in concept from Robuchon a Galera, which is considered by many to be Asia's finest pure French restaurant and a striking contrast to the Hotel Lisboa, the garish cross between a bird cage and a wedding cake owned by Stanley Ho.
A remarkable antithesis to the rococo gambling palace in which it sits, Robuchon a Galera is all starched napery and damask with only 10 tables seating 55 diners. The draperies are Thai silk. The glassware is Reidel. The cutlery is Cristofle, as are the silver tureens. The porcelain is Bernardaud from Limoges. In a burst of true excess, the fibre-optic lights twinkling in the ceiling are tipped with Swarovski crystal. The wine list is an astonishing 35 pages long and features as many as 3, wines, most of them classic French although there is a healthy sprinkling of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Australian and American ones also.
The kitchen is tucked discreetly away and dinner is served by a corps of superbly trained servers. L'Atelier is to be a long way from that. Still, there's no doubting that it's his interest in science, and his ability to popularise it, which has turned him into a star - and in a relatively short period of time.
It is only just over a decade since the self-trained Blumenthal, who turned 40 this year, opened his own restaurant - the only one he has ever worked in, apart from a few stages in a handful of other establishments.
Back then the Fat Duck was a simple bistro, serving classic French dishes. His more unusual creations came later, winning him his first Michelin star in , his second in and the all-coveted third in That year the Fat Duck also came top of the annual 50 Best Restaurants in the World list, voted for by his peers.
Today he is getting used to a new-found celebrity, and the knowledge that his book of the series is a Christmas bestseller. To be honest I was very surprised by the positive response. Viewers - particularly men, who are not big watchers of TV food shows - have been taken by his enthusiasm and his geeky attachment to experiments. There will almost certainly be another.
He has mixed feelings as to his wider influence on food in Britain. He accepts that, by pairing mustard ice creams with red-cabbage gazpacho, sprinkling cocoa powder over cauliflower risotto and making snail porridge, he has pushed back the boundaries on flavour combinations. Six or seven years ago when I put a crab ice cream on my menu, it was regarded as the devil.
Now if something like that was done for the first time I don't think anybody would bat an eyelid. Though he is too diplomatic to name anyone, he is clear that some terrible things are being done to food in the name of innovation.
There are people out there who are completely missing the point. As it says, 'Our beliefs and commitments are sincere and do not follow the latest trend. Time, then, to ask the man who has shown us the future of food, what else is to come. There's a growing argument that fat is a taste.
But the biggest development will be in what he calls 'sensory design'. No longer will eating out just be about putting stuff in our mouths and deciding whether it's nice. We're working with Sony to develop a directional speaker to push sound at diners in a particular way while they are eating.
For example, textbooks such as the classic Food Chemistry contained almost nothing on culinary transformations this is still the case in the most recent edition [ 15 ], with less than 0. The complexity of culinary transformations and the general lack of funding by the food industry for studies outside of its field were probably responsible for food science drifting slowly toward the science of ingredients and food technology, neglecting the phenomena that occur when cooking cassoulet, goulash, hollandaise sauce, and so on.
This lack of interest in culinary transformations is why the late Nicholas Kurti to [ 17 ], former professor of physics in Oxford, and I decided in March that a new discipline had to be introduced [ 2 ]. The situation at that time in food science was more or less the same as it had been for molecular biology some decades before.
The term molecular biology was first used by Warren Weaver in to describe certain programs funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, where it simply meant the application of techniques developed in the physical sciences to investigate life processes [ 18 ]. What Kurti and I had in mind was more or less the same, but concerning another field of knowledge, so the name molecular and physical gastronomy was chosen.
The appeal of this new field was and remains scientifically clear: if one wants to discover new phenomena, the exploration of a new field is a safe bet, as there is plenty of easy exploration. As always, when new knowledge is produced, it is possible to make technological applications.
Since , innovations based on molecular gastronomy have been introduced almost every month frequently, names of famous chemists of the past are given to new kinds of dishes [ 21 ]. However, the initial program of this discipline was inappropriate because it mixed science and technology. This last term describes information that is not absolutely necessary to make the dish old wives tales, proverbs, tips, methods, and so on [ 23 ]. Some years later, it was realized that the appreciation of a dish by an individual is a question of art, not of technique; thus, cooking involves an artistic activity of fundamental importance.
All these facts led to the proposal of new program for molecular gastronomy:. At the time that molecular gastronomy was introduced, we and others wanted to modernize culinary practices using what was done in scientific disciplines such as chemistry, physics or biology [ 25 ]. The idea to modernize techniques has come up many times in the history of cuisine.
In , Kurti [ 26 ] mentions the application of physical techniques and, since the beginning of the s, I proposed the use of chemical tools [ 27 ]. In this definition, the word new stands for what was not available in kitchens of the western countries in Concerning ingredients, many additives were no found in western kitchens of the 80's, but proved to have useful culinary applications: sodium alginate to make objects with a gellified skin and a liquid core, or spaghetti made of vegetables, and so on; other gelling agents, such as agar-agar or carrageenans; various colors; odorant compounds; and so on.
Of course, not all of these items are completely new, other gelling agents from algae have been used in Asia for thousands of years, and many of these tools are used daily in chemistry laboratories, but they were not used by western chefs, and the goal was to modernize the technical component of cooking. The term molecular cuisine was sometimes criticized, but the reasons for using it were that innovative cuisine had to be distinguished from science, and in particular from molecular gastronomy.
The arguments over the name are unlikely to matter as the term molecular cuisine is likely to die out with the adoption of new techniques.
A new idea is now being introduced with the name note by note cuisine [ 29 ]. Note by note cuisine was first proposed in in the magazine Scientific American [ 25 ] at a time when I started using compounds in drinks and dishes, such as paraethylphenol in wines and whiskeys; 1-octenol in sauces for meat; limonene; tartaric acid; and ascorbic acid among others. The initial proposal was to improve food, but surely an obvious next step was to make dishes entirely from compounds.
To put it differently, note by note cuisine does not use meat, fish, vegetable or fruits to make dishes, but instead uses compounds, either pure compounds or mixtures. An analogy would be in the way that electronic music is not made using trumpets or violins, but using pure waves that are mixed in to sounds and music.
For the various parts of the dish in note by note cuisine, the cook has to design the shapes, the colors, the tastes, the odors, the temperatures, the trigeminal stimulation, the textures, the nutritional aspects and more [ 30 ]. The feasibility of this new cuisine has already been shown.
However the first note by note meal was not served until October , by chefs of the Cordon Bleu School in Paris, to the participants of the courses at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Gastronomy [ 32 ]. On 26 January , at a banquet before the launching event of the International Year of Chemistry at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Paris, a whole note by note meal for about people was served by Potel et Chabot Catering Company [ 33 ].
This meal was again served in April to about chefs receiving Michelin stars in Paris. And since the number of note by note initiatives is becoming too big to be tracked. Many people are worried by note by note cuisine, asking questions about nutrition, toxicology, feasibility, economics and politics. What about nutriments, oligo-elements, vitamins? Are the compounds dangerous? Will food be liquid? Will agriculture become extinct through such a new way of cooking?
Our human brain, instead of making us reject novel food as nonhuman primates would do, leads us to negate new dishes and to legitimate old ones. This is a poor argument; compare this with smoked products, a traditional cooking method, that epidemiologists now clearly see the danger of through the high incidence of cancers of the digestive tract in populations in the north of Europe, who consume a lot of smoked products [ 36 ].
Food neophobia is not a good reason to discount the interest of note by note cuisine. Why should we drop traditional cuisine, and adopt note by note cuisine? Indeed the alternative is not compulsory; as for molecular cuisine, we could keep traditional cuisine and add note by note cuisine. Or produce hybrids…. The feasibility of note by note cuisine no longer needs to be demonstrated because meals have already been produced using this techniques, but we still have to discuss the nature of the compounds used.
The culinary world already uses very pure compounds, such as water, sodium chloride, sucrose and gelatine. The lay person often ignores the fact that these compounds were prepared by industry through various extraction processes, purifications and technological modifications for example, the anti-aggregation compounds added to sucrose [ 15 ].
Many other compounds could be prepared in the same way, such as saccharides, amino acids and glycerides, and indeed the food industry already uses some of them. The food additives industry produces pigments, vitamins, preservatives, gelling or thickening agents and so on. Additives are not currently regulated like food ingredients, but could they not be in the future? Or should the regulation of additives be suppressed, and another very different regulation be introduced?
It is difficult to make dishes from pure compounds, and so, to go back to our music analogy, another way is to make dishes in the same way electronic music is composed [ 37 , 38 ]. That is, to enlarge the list of usable compounds by adding simple mixtures such as those that the industry already makes by fractionation of milk or grain.
Gelatine, for example, is not pure, in the sense that it is not made of molecules of only one kind: the extraction method used to make gelatine results in large variation in the molecular weight of the polypeptidic chains [ 39 ]. Also starch is not pure, as it is made of two main compounds, amyloses and amylopectins.
In passing, let us not forget that, because starch is a simple fraction of grain, most traditional pastry techniques can be kept for making note by note cuisine. The industry already extracts polysaccharides, proteins, amino acids, surfactants and other compounds from grain [ 39 ]. From milk, the industry recovers amino acids, peptides, proteins and glycerides.
Could we not do the same from plant carrots, apples, turnips… or animal tissues? Could we not, using the same kind of processes such as direct or reverse osmosis, cryoconcentration or vacuum distillation , prepare fractions that can be used later for note by note cuisine?
Many technology groups study these questions, and technologists at the Montpellier Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique Centre, for example, have devised techniques based on membrane filtration to recover the total phenolics fraction from grape juice [ 40 ]. Now we have discussed the issue of ingredients, we have to consider assembling them into dishes. We should not forget that today's food items are material systems of a colloidal nature [ 41 — 43 ], often with a large proportion of water in them.
Many organic compounds are poorly soluble in water, and emulsification is obviously a very important process in note by note cuisine. However it is not the only process; all dispersion techniques will be useful. During the assembly, the various biological properties of food have to be considered.
Of course, the nutritional content is important [ 44 ] but it would be a mistake to forget that food has to stimulate the various sensory receptors involved in vision, odor, taste, trigeminal system and temperature [ 45 ], for instance: this creates many questions.
Also, when one mixes odorant compounds in proportions near the detection threshold, unpredictable odors are obtained. For taste, the question is even more difficult to answer, because taste receptors and their substrates are not known [ 48 ]; it was discovered only recently less than ten years ago that the tongue has receptors for fatty acids with long unsaturated chains [ 49 ].
This means that other important discoveries could still be made! In the meantime, one can use citric, malic, tartaric, acetic, ascorbic or lactic acids, or saccharides such as glucose, fructose or lactose, as well as the traditional sucrose but experimental tests will be needed to appreciate the result. For trigeminal effects, some fresh or pungent compounds are known, such as eugenol from cloves , menthol one of its enantiomers only , capsaicin from chilli , piperin from pepper , ethanol, sodium bicarbonate and many others [ 48 ].
But again the knowledge of receptors could lead to new products. From the texture point of view, technological work can be done, because more studies are needed on the manufacture of colloidal materials. Making simple emulsions is sometimes considered difficult, but more generally one should not assume that the texturization of formulated products is fully solved, even if we now have surimi and analogous systems.
Who will succeed in making the consistency of a green apple? Or a pear? Or a strawberry? Not only is there still the question of laboratory prototypes but also of mass production. As a whole, much remains to be done and many aspects of note by note cuisine remain to be studied by science and by technology.
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