Is the term molecular gastronomy dangerous to cooking?
HB: It sort of is dangerous. The term molecular gastronomy was invented by Nicholas Kurti and Hervé This for a particular science symposium held back in the 1980s. At the time it was fine, but food science has been around for a couple of hundred years and the knowledge that any food scientist has far exceeds that of any chef. But that’s food science. When science happens in the kitchen, whether your making a soufflé or boiling an egg, gaining some understanding of that, to make that more accessible, is to make life easier in the kitchen. What happened over the past ten years is that there was this new wave of cooking developing, which is an evolution or extension of nouvelle cuisine and what happened in cooking through the 1980s, and I suppose that there was at one point a need to pigeonhole it and give it a title, so ‘molecular gastronomy’ was used to try to understand what it does. But it is not a particular style of cooking. We embrace technology in everything that we do, but there’
