Food Sciences

Our kitchen is kind of like your kitchen, except that it has a drill press, a bandsaw, a homogenizer, a rotovape & a pharmaceutical freeze dryer that cost more than a Ferrari.  The team here includes chemists and chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world, but we’ve corrupted them all and now they can’t cook without a centrifuge.  For five years, we’ve been working to make Modernist Cuisine, a 2400 page cookbook about the science of cooking.  It has physics and chemistry lessons for chefs as well as practical recipes.  How do you make an omelet light and ten­der on the out­side but rich and creamy inside? Or French fries with a light and fluffy inte­rior and a del­i­cate, crisp crust that doesn’t go soggy? Imagine being able to encase a mus­sel in a gelled sphere of its own sweet and briny juice. Or to cre­ate a silky-smooth pis­ta­chio cream made from noth­ing more than the nuts them­selves.

We didn’t stop there.  Having the knowledge of this team in the Lab has helped us to create all kinds of food inventions.  They’ve also been instrumental in helping us approach some problems in developing countries.