To make pearls of balsamic vinegar, first chill a good amount of olive oil in a tall glass. While it waits in the fridge, in a small saucepan over a medium heat, bring the vinegar and agar-agar to the beginning of a boil – just until the agar-agar has dissolved. Let this mixture cool, remove the oil from the fridge, and use a pipette to drop balls of the agar-stiffened vinegar into the oil to form the pearls. Drain into another container using a small sieve to catch the pearls. Reserve the oil for another use.
I remember making these, my first and only foray into what is known as “molecular gastronomy”, in 2013. It was already a bit passe at that time, but the science experiment aspect of creating a simple acidic garnish for a chocolate and strawberry cupcake that Valentine’s Day was undoubtedly fun. The lesson influenced how I’d go on to use agar-agar, a seaweed-derived vegan gelatin, in dishes like panna cotta or flan, but I never made the pearls again. They were a novelty, and now I have a fond memory of cosplaying as Ferran Adrià, a Spanish chef who popularised these sorts of processes through the restaurant El Bulli.
The pearls came to mind while reading about an experiment conducted by Ernesto Di Maio at the University of Naples in Italy. His team found that if you swap an egg between boiling water and 30C water every two minutes for eight cycles, totalling 32 minutes, the egg will be perfectly evenly cooked between white and yolk. New Scientist reported on this finding rather credulously, as though home cooks are truly perplexed about how to boil an egg to their liking.
Rather than cooking science that’s about making something pretty and fun, like the vinegar pearls, this experiment was about making an instance of everyday cooking labour intensive, water-wasteful and time-consuming. I could see someone doing this experiment once, the way I made the vinegar pearls, and then going back to their tried-and-true method. (For what it’s worth, dropping eggs into already boiling water and letting them cook for seven minutes is how I get my preferred texture of jammy orange yolk.)
In the long history of the relationship between cooking and chemistry, there’s often been this kind of push-pull between what is actually going to enliven and enlighten a home cook, and a pursuit of perfection – whether in technique and taste or in nutrition. Indeed, cuisine in the US throughout the early part of the 20th century was defined by a divide between gourmands, who were interested in food and wine for the pleasure it gave them, and the “scientific cooks”, who were obsessed with eating as a means of ingesting the proper amount of vitamins, minerals and calories without any interest in the joys of the table.
“Food science” differs from the restaurant-driven style of molecular cooking because it’s usually focused on nutrition, flavour chemistry and shelf stability to the most common ends of creating industrial products. Molecular gastronomy, a term coined in 1988 by Hungarian-born British physicist Nicholas Kurti and French physical chemist Hervé This, has been focused on culinary applications of scientific principles and processes: sous-vide cooking a steak by sealing it in a vacuum bag and cooking it slowly in a water bath; using liquid nitrogen to create a carrot foam; or transforming the texture of olive juice through spherification. These techniques were popularised through El Bulli, Wylie Dufresne’s New York City restaurant wd~50, and Grant Achatz’s Chicago restaurant Alinea – and the latter is the only one of these still open and wowing diners with apple candy filled with helium that arrives to the table in the form of a balloon. (I’ve eaten there, and it inspired me to sous-vide slices of rutabaga – swede – again, just once.)
Rather than these kinds of perhaps gimmicky tasting-menu ideas, “innovation” in food these days tends to come in forms that are focused on an ideally sustainable future: plant-based faux meats; chef-driven proprietary seed companies like Dan Barber’s Row 7; or strawberries grown indoors year-round by the company Oishii. These are more in line with what food science has always been about, which is precision, uniformity and replication: products that can scale and turn a profit, but retain the culinary considerations learned from molecular gastronomy.
If there is to be a scientific touch to food, it’s come to be understood that there should be an element of that higher-minded gastronomic purpose afoot in order to convince people of its worth.
While it’s always been fun to mix scientific approaches with home cooking, what worries me about a focus on “innovation” for the sake of a “perfect” squash or strawberry, a profit-driven soy patty, or new techniques for simple things like boiling eggs is that they could have the effect of deterring people from cooking. Learning how to pick fruit or vegetables at the market and getting into the kitchen to cook them will always be acts of trial and error, and they should be fun.
Cooking is an experiment, every day, in how water, oil, salt and so many other elements can come together for the purpose of making something delicious. But unlike a laboratory or a factory, the result doesn’t need to be the same every single time, or held to a precise scientific standard. Weather, moods and attention all influence how a human cooks – and there’s a lot to enjoy in the imperfections.
Alicia Kennedy is a food and culture writer and author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, and a forthcoming memoir On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites
