Notes on Modernist Cooking

Notes on Modernist Bengali Cooking

(This is a rough draft and needs attribution and fact checking)

Modernist cooking.

Over the past few days, I have been reading about modernist cooking and their differences from traditional cooking. In traditional cooking, we tend to follow traditional recipes handed down to us from the chefs of the past or our ancestors, without much questioning as to what happens to the taste, flavour, texture, and aroma if we change the recipe or the processes of preparation. Modernist cooking, on the other hand, take the act of cooking similar to a laboratory experiment and enocurages us to consider each ingredient from the view of scientific standpoint, and each step in the process of cooking food as a laboratory experiment and makes us conscious about what we are doing, why we are doing and how we are doing things. In turn, our cooking and food preparation becomes a matter of not just scientific endeavour but touches on the complex psychology of taste and flavour perception and how we may think about the impact of food on humans and environment. This is not the focus of traditional cuisine, where chefs have experimented largely with a number of ingredients and cooking styles. In this sense, molecular cuisine or molecular cooking, or molecular gastronomy and modernist cuisine is distinct from anything we have seen earlier, it is distinct from novelle cuisine, and it is certainly different from people trying new combinations with old ingredients or spinoffs with other flavours.

Allow me to explain. Let’s take the simple act of cooking an egg, or boiling an egg. Normally, consider what I’d do if I wanted to have a half-boiled egg (runny albumen and yolk). Here’s the simple recipe. Boil water and add salt to the boiling water, drop two eggs in it, then boil for about five minutes, and after five minutes, transfer to a bowl filled with ice and water. The egg turns out to have soft white and delectable yolk. Modernist cooking has forced me to ask what happens in these states and why? What’d I do differently? What is the effect of changing the times through which I cook the egg in water and changing the temperature in which I am cooking the eggs. What are the outcomes? These, in terms of modernist cooking, would be parametric egg cooking. For example, if I were to cook egg for four minutes in boiling water, and keep in iced water for three minutes, then the egg would be runny and soft. On the other hand, if I were to keep the eggs in boiling water for about seven minutes, and then stop the cooking in cold water, I would end up with a hard boiled egg.

Modernist cooking has made me question and seek answers for why this should be so. Egg, it turns out, has albumen that has about 90% water and 10% protein and yolk likewise has fat and protein. On the one hand this tells me that eggs have little carbohydrates, and therefore it is a suitable food for people who perforce must consume little carbohydrates (think of diabetics). On the other, it makes me question as to why is this so that while the whites become firmer in the same water temperature, the yolk still remains runny. I also start wondering that a liquid, when subjected to heat, changes its state from liquid to firm. The magic, it turns out is in the way the proteins uncoil and change their structure when they are heated up. At about 90 degree centigrade, the whites change their shape in one way, and the yolk has a different temperature setting for the denaturation (check the facts), This difference in the heat sensitivity accounts for the delectable different “texture” of the eggs when I cook the eggs through a certain temperature and then “stop” cooking by dunking the eggs in cold water.

Some tools and Concepts

As I increasingly adopt modernist cooking style, I increasingly start thinking about what do I need to to make my food preparation more scientific and how may I adapt my food preparation to enhance the taste, flavour, texture, aroma, mouthfeel of the food. Let’s start with some of the concepts that are moot. First in the list is taste. Taste is determined by taste molecules, or more specifically the water content of the food and its interaction with the tongue and the rest of the mouth. Taste is distinct from aroma which are determined ny aroma molecules that are fat soluble molecules that waft from the food through the back of mouth through to the olfactory bulb to the oflfactory cortext and the sensation of aroma of the food. Usually taste, flavour, and aroma occur together in the food we eat or drink.

Concepts of Taste

Traditionally, we used to consider four tastes that are perceived by the nerve fibres in the papillae in our tongues. Back of the tongue we have bitter taste perception, a taste perception that is known to have saved us from consuming poisons in course of our evolution. Bengali foods for example, in our feasts we start with bitters that are typically fried. The bitters are said to have primed the taste sensation for the next set of taste. Salt perception is the taste perception on the middle part of the tongue and presence of salt perceiving receptors are useful for maintaining our ionic balance in the body. Perception of sourness brought about acidic components is on both sides of the tongue and no one seems to know the significance of this taste perception. The sweet perception is on on the tip of our tongue, so food that consists of glucose or similar molecules bind with the receptors that allow us to perceive sweetness in the food (think of lollies, honey, jam, and so on). Beyond these four taste perceptions, we also have another sense perception referred to as “umami”, which is the “feel” or taste in the mouth when we eat something like meat. Just as salt perception is associated with sodium or potassium chlorides, sour perception is associated with different acids whose pH values go lower than four, sweet perception is associated with glucose and similar molecules, and bitter is associated with tannins and alkaloids (think of oils in coffee and bitters in bitter melons), umami perception is associated with presence of gluatmates (amino acids that are derived from proteins typically animal proteins). A useful way to think of umami perception is to think in terms of monosodium glutamate used on Chinese cooking that imparts their unique taste sensations.

Concept of texture

Texture of the food refers to the physical state of the food. Some food items, such as sandesh or paneer or the sweets made from milk in Bengali food items are firm to the mouth. Others such as a smooth dal is liquid but within the liquid there is a certain graininess that imparts a unique texture to the grains of dal in the mouth. Yet, a smooth jhol is liquid or consomme, that has a different texture and corresponding different feel in the mouth. Texture of food is determined by the content of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates that make up the backbone of the food as we put the food in mouth. Texture helps to bind the various components of the food we consume. Texture is determined by the consistency of the food as it is present in the environment and then it enters our mouth.

Flavour

Flavourmolecule and odour molecules.

Mouthfeel

When the food enters mouth, the feeling of a food in the mouth cavity

Types of Food

Gels

Practically everything is a gel, where fluids are trapped inside solids

Emulsions

Emulsifiers or surfactants (Garlic, Soy Lecithin, Egg Yolks) You can use heat to create emulsions Water and oil do not mix, so even with vigorous mixing, after a while water and oil will separate out. In order to stabilise the emulsion, we need molecules that have two moieities: one facing the oil or fat, and the other the water phase

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