Cooking: Delicious science
7th January 2014
Food science has often focused on nutrition or industrial-scale food and flavour production. But over the past two decades, a discipline that blends science and cooking has made its way into universities, restaurants and even home kitchens. Collaborations between scientists and chefs have made advances in the study of gastronomy and spurred culinary innovations that are opening up fresh ways of studying something we often take for granted: the enjoyment of a good meal.
This field is often called ‘molecular gastronomy’, although both scientists and chefs have objected to the term (see ‘Name that cuisine’). Hervé This, a chemist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris, who coined the term in 1988, wanted to establish a new field that uses science to understand what happens to food when it is cooked.
We have the technology.