• – Ladies, Gents, Fellow Humans and Aliens, welcome back. It is week 6 of THE STUDENT BLOGGING CHALLENGE. This week was all about science! And I chose to cover something you probably haven’t heard of: Molecular Gastronomy. Yeah that sounds a bit like a type of disease or a weird scientific thing. Well it is a bit of a weird science thing. Molecular Gastronomy is the study of the science behind food, and what happens when you are creating food and the science behind it. Yep it’s strange. But keep on reading and you’ll  learn all about this wierd and wacky field of science.

 

What is this?! 

Molecular Gastronomy is a new term. Relatively speaking, the term was decided upon in 1988. For a field of science that is very very new. Of course, science isn’t new to cooking. Science has been used for millennia in cooking. For example when you bake you are causing a series of chemical reactions that allows the dough or mix that you are baking to rise. Molecular Gastronomy is like combining art and science at the same time but we’ll be focusing primarily on the chemical/science side of this concept. Some techniques, processes and chemicals that are studied in this field are:

– Spherification. Causing an object to form a water drop like appearance using the following chemicals: Sodium Alginate and/or calcium chloride

– Liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen is a chemical element. Rather it is the liquid form of the chemical element known as nitrogen. It used to freeze foods and will do so almost immediately when it makes contact with said food. It is often used to make a kind of super smooth ice cream.

– Transglutaminase. Transglutaminase are an enzyme that is used a meat glue. I know yuck right? It’s used to bond “meat” things together like if you were making a meat ball.

– Making food foam.Yes, you read that right. Molecular Gastronomy is coming up with wierd and wacky food. Food foam is one of them, for example there is such a thing as pamersan foam. But you had heard of food foam before, like whip cream. But did you ever think of how it was made. Chefs make this food foam using the scientific procedure of Emulsion. Emulsion is when two liquids that can’t mix together are “combined and form a foam”.

 

There are a multitude of other techniques but they are quite challenging to explain. I you would like to read more about it click here.

Just to make sure you understand 

Well as much as I have tried to explain it, it’s a weird concept. So here’s a video to better explain it. Watch carefully.

Quiz time! 

You must have watched the video tu be able to do this right. Leave your answers in the question below

Spherication is creating foam. True or False. 

What chemical element is used to make super smooth ice cream? 

When was the name for Molecular Gastronomy coined? 

An edible menu was printed in a restaurant in San Francisco on what material? 

Well that’s it for today. I hope you found this topic interesting and learnt about it. I still don’t know as much as I would like to about this field and will keep on exploring it.