Molecular Gastronomy - As A Style of Cooking

As A Style of Cooking

The term molecular gastronomy was originally intended to refer only to the scientific investigation of cooking, though it has been adopted by a number of people and applied to cooking itself or to describe a style of cuisine.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the term started to be used to describe a new style of cooking in which some chefs began to explore new possibilities in the kitchen by embracing science, research, technological advances in equipment and various natural gums and hydrocolloids produced by the commercial food processing industry. It has since been used to describe the food and cooking of a number of famous chefs, though many of them do not accept the term as a description of their style of cooking.

Other names for the style of cuisine practiced by these chefs include:

• Avant-garde cuisine
• Culinary constructivism
• Cocina de vanguardia - term used by Ferran Adrià
• Emotional cuisine
• Experimental cuisine
• Forward-thinking movement - term used at Grant Achatz's Alinea
• Kitchen science
• Modern cuisine
• Modernist Cuisine, title of cookbook endorsed by Ferran Adrià of El Bulli and David Chang
• Molecular cuisine
• Molecular cooking
• New cuisine
• New cookery
• Nueva cocina
• Progressive cuisine
• Techno-emotional cuisine—term preferred by elBulli research and development chef Alain Devahive
• Technologically forward cuisine
• Vanguard cuisine
• Techno-cuisine

No singular name has ever been applied in consensus, and the term "molecular gastronomy" continues to be used often as a blanket term to refer to any and all of these things - particularly in the media. Ferran Adrià hates the term "molecular gastronomy" and prefers 'deconstructivist' to describe his style of cooking. A 2006 open letter by Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Harold McGee published in The Times used no specific term, referring only to "a new approach to cooking" and "our cooking".