NOTE BY NOTE COOKING – THE FUTURE OF FOOD

So before giving you an idea about this book I feel compelled to point out that the field of Note by Note cooking although new to many; is a concept which Herve This has been proposing for several years as can be seen in the several Kitchen Theory posts and interviews over the years.

In a nutshell; the concept of Note by Note cooking as a discipline in the kitchen revolves around the idea of using pure molecular compounds as the building blocks of a dish. So rather than selecting a range of  traditional foodstuffs as ingredients for a dish the cook could instead reach beyond these constraints and work with a multitude of ‘new’ ingredients along the lines of 1-Octen-3-ol, which has a scent of wild mushrooms; limonene, a colorless liquid hydrocarbon that has the smell of citrus; sotolon, whose fragrance at high concentrations resembles curry and at low concentrations, maple syrup or sugar; tyrosine, an odorless but flavorful amino acid present in cheese. These compounds (some occurring in nature, some synthesized in the laboratory) make it possible to create novel tastes and flavors in the same way that elementary sound waves can be combined to create new sounds.

If you in anyway consider yourself to be a forward thinking, modernist, experimental chef of sorts, that last paragraph should have whet your appetite so much that your next action will be to log on to amazon (or where ever else suits you) and buy this book!

And for all of you who have read this and absolutely hate the idea of more science being involved in the culinary world please take note of the following: Note-by-note cooking promises to add unadulterated nutritional value to dishes of all kinds, actually improving upon the health benefits of so-called natural foods. Cooking with molecular compounds will be far more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable than traditional techniques of cooking. This new way of thinking about food heralds a phase of culinary evolution on which the long-term survival of a growing human population depends. Herve This clearly explains the properties of naturally occurring and synthesized compounds, dispels a host of misconceptions about the place of chemistry in cooking, and shows why note-by-note cooking is an obvious — and inevitable — extension of his earlier pioneering work in molecular gastronomy.