Invite Science to the Party

How modern technique can make a quick yet special meal

Time is of the essence. Unfortunately, it is not always on my side.

Take a recent night. Feeling like the rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland," I had just managed to finish the day's work when I looked at my watch. No time! Guests coming!

And it wasn't a casual event. My friends had just announced that they were getting married, and I was having them over for dinner to celebrate. I'd had great plans for the meal when I'd gone shopping earlier in the day. I had even discussed the menu with the groom-to-be. But then I had simply lost track of time.

Normally, that would have meant I was headed for disaster. What saved me was that I had recently immersed myself in a particular aspect of modern food science: shortcuts and pragmatic solutions.

Fifteen minutes before my guests were due to arrive, I ran into the kitchen. And after some frantic and rather unorganized activity that involved everything, including the kitchen sink, I actually managed to pull it off. My friends got a three-course meal of some merit, with all the right elements to match the occasion: a simple but refined fish dish; super-tender meat with a lovely, rich sauce; a kind of inverted soft-centered chocolate pudding; lots of wine; and only a slight suspicion that I was somewhat higher-strung than usual.

Food science and molecular gastronomy often are associated with high-tech, time-consuming cooking processes, as expressed in three recently published and brilliant but not easily accessible cookbooks by renowned chefs Thomas Keller ("Under Pressure"), Grant Achatz ("Alinea") and Heston Blumenthal ("The Big Fat Duck Cookbook"). In all three books the reader is invited to spend days re-creating the incredibly elaborate dishes that are served in the writers' multi-starred restaurants.

However inspirational it is to see great chefs take cooking to new heights, it is a paradox that while scientific advances have made many aspects of our lives so much easier, they somehow make cooking much more difficult. We have cellphones equipped with GPS locators, but in the kitchen we are asked to do the wiring for the switchboard ourselves.

It can be disheartening even for the best of us. When I asked chef Ferran Adrià last year what he normally cooked at home, he answered laconically, "Normally, I don't cook at home."

For my meal, I took courage and inspiration from one of the first books published on food science, "But the Crackling Is Superb" (Institute of Physics Publishing, 1988). The book contains essays by food-loving scientists, among them the late, distinguished John Philip. In his essay, "Parsimonious but Creative Gastronomy," Philip advocated a less rigorous and time-consuming approach to cooking and encouraged the use of newer inventions that science and technology had to offer, at that time the microwave and convection oven. He put his food and science philosophy in the plainest terms: "Unnecessary work profoundly depresses people (like me) who are naturally lazy. We lazy people admire science most when it achieves maximum insight with minimum means, but we tend to think poorly of the use of elaborate methods." That works well for people in a hurry, too.

For the starter, I used a cooking technique similar to one previously described in this column: I boiled water and poured it over salmon fillets. By using a water-to-fish ratio of 4 to 1 (achieved by weighing both fish and water) and allowing the fish to cool in the water, I achieved a result as close to perfection as I could hope for: juicy, tender and full of flavor. With the addition of a slice of smoked salmon, Meyer lemon juice, chives and a little creme fraiche, there was enough to it to call it a dish, even though the active cooking time was minimal. No pots to watch, no timing to get wrong.

For the main course, I had bought a filet of beef and wanted to cook it slowly to achieve maximum tenderness and juiciness. I was inspired by Keller's "Under Pressure," where for the first time the revolutionary sous-vide cooking processes are explained in detail. The basic principle is this: Fish, meat or vegetables are sealed in a vacuum, submerged in a water bath and cooked at precise temperatures, often significantly lower than what we are used to.

The book also illustrates the inaccessibility of such techniques. The recipes can be made only if the reader invests thousands of dollars in highly specialized equipment, and even then the dishes often demand days of preparation, not to mention weeks, months or years of practice. It makes the long waiting lists and the $250 tasting menus at Keller's Per Se and French Laundry seem relatively cheap and effortless.