Foam Fatale

What are these things,you ask? What on earth is smoke foam,for example? El Bulli’s chef-owner,Ferran Adrià would explain: it’s a froth of just gelatine and water,flavoured with woodsmoke — created using a pressure cooker and a gas-cartridge whipper — served with a drizzle of olive oil and flecks of toast. It is supposed,according to Adrià,to remind us of eating grilled toast with olive oil. Whether it actually tastes better than toast and olive oil is a question that I am unfortunately not able to answer. Nor can I describe what Adrià’s frozen chocolate air tastes like (presuming mere words can),or his parmesan ice cream,or his garlic-and-almond sorbet.

Adrià has led a decades-long movement to comprehensively alter high cuisine’s conception of itself. These chefs use high-pressure cookers,liquid nitrogen,N2O canisters,immersion blenders,centrifuges and dehydrators; they incorporate cutting-edge chemical and biological additives,such as agar,xanthan and sodium alginate; they revel in odd food pairings. They put little dollops of olive oil and olive juice with calcium lactate gluconate and put them in a chemical bath that “cooks” them till they have created,in effect,artificial olives. They make foams of absolutely everything,and serve them to you on a silver spoon.

So confusingly do these chefs blur any distinction between high-tech experimentation and playing with your food that their movement has come to be called “molecular gastronomy”. They don’t like that; it seems to debase their art,and the bloodlessness of the phrase has been a rhetorical gift to traditionalists who can’t abide all this fancy-schmancy nonsense.

And not just traditionalists,either. I certainly am no traditionalist,but I was tiring of it,too. There was a point about a decade ago when every young person with a new restaurant seemed to have succumbed to the deadly allure of foam. You arrived,hungry,at a well-recommended new bistro,and were faced with menus that were half foam and half inedible. You would smile tolerantly as you persevered through the incomprehensibly-named appetiser,served in a glass with strict instructions to drink it in two gulps over not more than three seconds; through the innovative,and sometimes ghastly,food pairing,perhaps of lotus root chips with lobster foam; to the dessert that rebelled against the straitjacket of food tradition by containing nothing but sugar substitute. The flavours could be intense,the inventiveness diverting,and you invariably had to stop for a greasy pizza slice on the way home.

I began to look at harmless,nutritious produce glowing with rude nutritiveness in the shops and wonder if,somewhere,there was a young,wild-eyed chef trying to transform it into foam using a kitchen that looked like a mad scientists’ lab in a Bond film.

The reaction was as intense as the flavour of cayenne-and-caviar foam. Adrià was viciously attacked,even by his neighbours; Santi Santamaria,a legendary Catalan cook with a restaurant not far from El Bulli,famously launched into him,accusing him of serving his customers dishes that were pretentious,unhealthy and — fighting words in Spain,these — dishonourable. The impression grew that there was something too white-coated and over-cerebral about such food,so much so that Adrià and some of his most famous fellow-innovators actually wrote an open letter distancing themselves from the phrase “molecular gastronomy”,saying: “We do not pursue novelty for its own sake. We may use modern thickeners,sugar substitutes,enzymes,liquid nitrogen,sous-vide,dehydration,and other nontraditional means,but these do not define our cooking.”

Yet Adrià continued to be in demand. The reason that El Bulli survived for so long in spite of R&D budgets that would strain a mid-sized pharma company: it was subsidised by the enormous fees that Adrià earned as a speaker and teacher,and a leader of what he tried to get us to call the “new cooking”,or “deconstructivism”. The experimenters have seen off their challengers; indeed,Adrià has declared that El Bulli is not closing,merely metamorphosing into a culinary think-tank.

And,truthfully,in spite of suffering through so many inept Adrià-imitators,I am pleased. Because one of the greatest meals I had was at 71 Clinton Fresh Food,in New York,run by ponytailed,bespectacled Wylie Dufresne,where I discovered that Brussels sprouts could be made into chips,and sea bass could be crusted with edamame instead of salt. At his next restaurant,wd-50,he convinced me of the virtues of fried mayonnaise and scrambled-egg ravioli. That’s true,delicious,inventiveness. If it requires a giant research budget and a couple of lab coats,who cares?

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com