Chemical cuisine poised to shake up food chain

WHEN Pierre Gagnaire, a chef with three Michelin stars, and Hervé This, the man who coined the term "molecular gastronomy", is standing before you, you expect a decent meal. A tender loin of venison, a touch of samphire, perhaps an "air" or two.

Instead, at the second International Contest of Note by Note cooking he opens up a brown leather medical bag packed with bottles that have labels like Maltodextrin, Citric acid and Allyl isothiocyanate. He pours a few teaspoons of various powders into a pan, adds some water and heats it all up. A few minutes later, he presents a beige pancake. It tastes like meat and potato.

Whereas molecular gastronomy uses scientific techniques to induce weird and wonderful chemical transformations in traditional ingredients, note-by-note cooking goes a step further: it uses chemical reactions to produce meals from chemical compounds and cooking alone. When you create dishes from compounds, you can design the shape, the colour, the taste, the odour and the nutritional aspects of your dish from scratch, says This.

Although still in its infancy, the concept goes beyond artistic endeavour. With the population expected to increase by 2 billion people by 2050, there is a desperate need for new ways of creating more sustainable food. Note-by-note cooking is not the only concept hoping to shake up the global food industry. A number of new companies are engineering alternative foods in the attempt to overcome the ethical, environmental and economic problems that burden our food chain.

The first official note-by-note dish was created by Gagnaire in 2009. It consisted of a crispy caramel strip, lemon sorbet and jelly pearls that tasted like apple – minus any caramel, lemon or apple. To create such a dish, you first have to understand what chemicals give foods their taste, structure and aroma, using techniques such as mass spectrometry to identify the constituent parts. These building blocks can be extracted from animal or plant tissues or made artificially.

For example, maltodextrin, a chemical that improves the texture of low-fat foods and beer, is produced by hydrolysing starch. Methional, a flavour compound that tastes like potato, is synthesised in the lab.

Such structural and flavour compounds are then combined, along with any desired vitamins and minerals, and cooked to make an edible substance – one that could have, say, the texture of a meringue but the flavour of roast pork. We\\\'re not trying to recreate a chicken or a carrot: it wouldn\\\'t be as good as the real thing, it is much more exciting to investigate dishes that have never been envisioned using traditional ingredients. Whole new flavour continents can be discovered, says This.

Rather than providing meals with all the essential nutrients, the chefs presenting their fare at the second International Contest of Note by Note were more concerned with demonstrating that such chemical cuisine was a feasible concept. We\\\'re trying to get the idea across that we don\\\'t have to grow food products, we can make good alternatives with the same nutrients and constituent parts in a lab, said one chef.

They\\\'re not alone. Soylent, a beige concoction of 30 ingredients that is claimed to satisfy all the body\\\'s nutritional needs, has been developed by Silicon Valley software engineers who claim they have no time to eat normally.

In San Francisco, food scientists at Hampton Creek are trying to create the perfect egg – with no chickens in sight. They are analysing thousands of plant proteins to identify those that can be used to replicate an egg\\\'s taste, nutritional value and cooking properties. Their aim is to create egg-based products without needing to intensively farm chickens. Their first product – an egg-free mayonnaise called Just Mayo – is now sold in Whole Foods shops in the US and Europe.

There\\\'s a real ethical issue with the production of eggs and the condition that caged birds live in. If we can replace some foods that normal consumers eat using plant proteins then we can relieve some of those issues, says Lee Chae, Hampton Creek\\\'s director of bioinformatics.

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