There are many films that have used the kitchen stove to tell us dramatic stories, bittersweet comedies or simply make us smile. Among them we cannot forget the French Comme un chef , starring the incomparable Jean Reno, who plays a chef who does not understand the new management of the company that owns his restaurant, who prefers to bet on the new molecular cuisine. Quite the opposite of what happens in the gastronomic film par excellence, Ratatouille , a real pleasure for the senses and a hymn to traditional preparations, far from the frills of rotary evaporators, liquid nitrogen and nitrocellulose. And it is that in the end, after thousands of years of cooking, chefs discovered that their work is pure chemistry.
It all started on March 14, 1969. Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti was invited to give one of the classic Friday Afternoon Lectures at the Royal Institution in London, a society that was founded in 1799 with the aim of “spreading the knowledge of the experiments and applications of science in the common objects of life”. Since he could not fail for such a lofty motive, the Hungarian’s lecture was entitled “ The Physicist in the Kitchen ”. Recorded by the BBC, one of the most quoted sentences from this memorable talk is the following: “ It is sad that we know better the temperature inside stars than the inside of a soufflé ”. Something that he corrected right there, showing how it rises from 20º, and then goes down and rises again until it reaches 70º when it is removed from the oven. It also showed that injecting pineapple juice into meat makes it more tender due to the enzyme bromelain, which breaks down proteins. He also showed how Benjamin Thompson, founder of the Royal Institution and one of the first scientists to understand what heat was, cooked a shoulder of lamb at a low temperature: if you put a 2kg piece at 80ºC, after eight hours and The average temperature inside and outside the piece is 75ºC and the lamb is perfectly cooked and very tender . And it is that thermodynamics is found in every corner of the kitchen.
For his part, in March 1980, a young French chemist, Hervé This, began his particular research program: check the kitchen advice of the grandmother, those “lifelong” recommendations, such as the one that a stew is preferable of copper to make the desserts , and that no one had bothered to see if they really worked. Six years later, This and Kurti were at the Chez Maître Paul restaurant in the Latin Quarter of Paris and discovered that their visions were complementary: a physicist concerned with introducing physics into the kitchen and a chemist wishing to cleanse the books of false beliefs. kitchen.
Molecular cuisine arrives
They soon found support among chefs and scientists, such as Nobel laureate Pierre Gilles de Gennes or Philippe Corsaletti, president of Eurotoques, the European association of chefs. The combined effort of all of them crystallized in Erice (Italy) in 1992, where the First International Congress of Physical and Molecular Gastronomy was held. Actually, This’s proposal was only Molecular Gastronomy, but Kurti insisted that physics also had something to say in the kitchen and This bowed to the master.
The effect of scientific research carried out since then has made it possible to understand, for example, why when taking a suckling pig out of the oven you have to cut off its head so that the skin remains crispy : during cooking, the water evaporates from both the skin and the inside the toston, but when you take it out of the oven, the steam inside comes out through the skin, softening it. If the head is cut, it comes out through that area and the skin is very crispy.
But it was at the end of the 1990s, and especially with the arrival of the new century, when Molecular Gastronomy, which lost the word Physics after Kurti’s death, became the word that defined chefs (sorry, restaurateurs ) who began to apply the classic methods of the chemistry laboratory in their culinary creations. Among its greatest creators were Ferrán Adriá of El Bulli, the overwhelming Pierre Gagnaire in Paris and the unclassifiable Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck in the United Kingdom.
The kitchen is a chemistry lab
Knowing how reviled the word “chemistry” is, it is worth remembering that our kitchen is, in essence, a chemical laboratory. Why is the crust of bread tastier than the crumb? Why do you have to brush a leg of suckling lamb with oil before putting it in the oven? Why is beer that golden color? Why does roasted coffee taste so good? All these and similar questions that we can ask ourselves when walking around the kitchen are answered succinctly with three words: Maillard reaction .
On November 27, 1911, the French chemist Louis Camille Maillard presented the results of his research at the Academy of Sciences under the title The action of sugars on amino acids, where he described what is now known as the Maillard reaction. Although in reality it is not one but a complicated set of reactions not yet very well known. Thus, what happens in the kitchen due to the action of heat is that the compounds belonging to the same family as table sugar (which biochemists call carbohydrates) and the amino acids in food react, giving rise to compounds that, although Produced in minimal quantities, they are basic when it comes to providing those exquisite smells and flavors of good cuisine.
And it is that, as Kurti said in that proverbial conference almost 50 years ago, “ the discovery of a new dish has done more for the happiness of humanity than the discovery of a new star ”.
