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Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)
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Description

Hervé This (pronounced "Teess") is an internationally renowned chemist, a popular French television personality, a bestselling cookbook author, a longtime collaborator together with the famed French chef Pierre Gagnaire, and the only person to hold a doctorate in molecular gastronomy, a cutting-edge field he pioneered. Delivering the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen, This uses recent research in the chemistry, physics, and biology of food to challenge traditional ideas concerning cooking and eating. What he discovers will entertain, instruct, and intrigue cooks, gourmets, and scientists alike.

Molecular Gastronomy, This's first work to be visible in English, is filled together with practical tips, provocative suggestions, and penetrating insights. This begins by reexamining and debunking a diversity of time-honored rules and dictums concerning cooking and presents new and improved ways of preparing a diversity of dishes from quiches and quenelles to steak and hard-boiled eggs. He goes on to discuss the physiology of flavor and explores how the brain perceives tastes, how chewing affects food, and how the tongue reacts to various stimuli. Examining the molecular properties of bread, ham, foie gras, and champagne, the book analyzes what happens as they are baked, cured, cooked, and chilled.

Looking to the future, Herve This imagines new cooking methods and proposes novel dishes. A chocolate mousse not including eggs? A flourless chocolate cake baked in the microwave? Molecular Gastronomy explains how to do them. This in addition shows us how to cook ideal French fries, why a soufflé rises and falls, how long to cool champagne, when to season a steak, the right way to cook pasta, how the form of a wine glass affects the taste of wine, why chocolate turns white, and how salt modifies tastes.

Customer Reviews
Customer rating is 2 of 5  A Letdown   2009-08-19
By Brian LeBaron (New Orleans, LA, United States)
I had very high hopes for this book. I thought it was going to be a great read for someone who is well versed in science and wants to learn more about cooking methods. I was wrong.

I have a not insignificant number of problems with the book, which I'll go through rather quickly. First, I could tell as early as the introduction that something was off about the writing. I don't know how the book read in its original French, but this is one of the most awkward translations I've ever seen. Nothing screams out at you - there aren't typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete sentences. It's the style. This book completely lacks a writer's style. I suspect it may have been translated rather literally by a person who was not an established English writer, but by someone who could indeed write in English. There is absolutely no flow - not only from chapter to chapter (it is important to note that there are 100 chapters in this book, for an average of 3 pages per chapter), but also not from the beginning of one chapter to the end of it, nor even from the beginning of some paragraphs to their ends. All of the words are on the page and all of the thoughts are there, but they are not strung together well at all. While I wouldn't describe it as 'incoherent,' it is painful to follow. There is rarely, if ever, any coherence from one chapter to another for more than two or [if ever] three at a time. The progression is not at all natural and seems entirely arbitrary. Each chapter barely covers anything - as I said, they are only two to three pages each. How much can you say in so little space, especially when the chapter following it is on a different topic entirely?

The other thing that bothers me is the science. It should be said that I am a scientist by trade and training, and a lover of food and writing by hobby. As someone who reads and produces scientific research, I can say that the author of this book is not such a person. What he appears to have done is found 100 'interesting' articles about food and cooking, and then summarized each article in its own three page chapter. The original research is at best only mentioned vaguely, though the end of the book does have a 9 page 'Further Reading' section (in alphabetical order) which I suspect is actually his 'References' section (I do not care enough to check, especially since it is not even broken up into the 'four parts' of the book). It is very apparent by the summaries of the research that the author (or, perhaps the translator - I don't know how one could tell the difference) did not really understand what he was reading. One particular blurb about 'the alpha subunit of G proteins' strongly reeked of someone who was parroting words he didn't understand (because G-Protein Coupled Receptors are something I do I understand by nature of my work). In almost all of these summaries, the author will throw out terms and phrases such as "a truncated form of a neuronal protein known as a metabotropic glutamate receptor, or mGluR4" (page 98 for the curious) and will absolutely avoid explaining what any of that means, including why a truncated protein is significant, why the protein is 'neuronal,' or what a metabotropic receptor is. If he were a scientist, he would display some sort of adeptness with the terms, and the scientific audience would know what he is talking about. He isn't, though, and phrases like that leave me a bit puzzled even though I know exactly what the fancy words mean. He has therefore completely missed the mark on his audience, the layman. In the rare occasion where he does try to define a scientific term like that, he will use something resembling a textbook definition. The problem with this lies in that the description has you looking up more terms than the original point in question did. The appropriate method for description of these terms is analogy, not denotation. Analogies would help the audience understand what is important and why it is important. Unfortunately, the book has none of these, and is comparable to a magician distracting you with his left hand while he prepares the next magic trick in his right (see what I did there? Analogy).

Finally, for a book about food and cooking, it MUST be said that there are ZERO recipes in the book. There are not even SUGGESTIONS of recipes. There is plenty of 'proteins denature at X temperature,' but there is absolutely no incentive to cook. Science is a wonderful thing, really. But why write a book about cooking without actually doing anything about it? If you want science in your kitchen, read Robert Wolke's Einstein books. They didn't blow my mind, but they are more interesting, better written, more practical, and they even manage to squeeze some recipes in regarding the science in the book! Barham's Science of Cooking, though bland, is better than this book and again at least it has both SCIENCE and COOKING. If you are interested in baking, Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice has much to teach you about bread, enzymes, etc. (though it is not strictly a science book). And finally, Alton Brown is always more accessible and more interesting than this book could ever hope to be, even though his stuff is a little goofy sometimes.

I think that covers most of my problems with the book. Cliff's Notes: It was not scientific, it didn't make me want to cook, didn't go in depth on any topics, didn't display mastery or even comprehension of most topics covered, was hard to follow, and was not unified in theme.

When I find a really good book on science and cooking, I'll let you know.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  must for every cooking professional   2009-08-09
By Buddha Dev Bej (richmond, VA)
molecular gastronomy gives you an insight of science behind cooking.
it explains and busts the myths of a kitchen
if ur a person who likes getting into the food to understand it and its changes wd cooking, then this book is a must to be read.

for all those who have a passion for new age cooking, grabe it or ur left behind the new trend going past u
Customer rating is 2 of 5  Not useful at all   2009-05-18
By Jackal (Singapore)
The book is full of short essays about various food topics. In most essays This tries to debunk what some chef has declared to be the truth. So far so good (but often the chef is somebody who has been dead 100 years. I question the choice of chefs to scrutinise). The author then presents some findings from studies. Fine. However, the key problem is that he fails to conclude. What is the takeaway from each chapter? He should have addressed this. Alternatively enough information should have been provided so that the reader could decide for himself. So as is, the book is rather useless. Hence my question in the heading: Who the target audience for the book is beats me. McGee's book On Food and Cooking is a much better read to understand the science of cooking. Then I would go for the books of the leading chefs in the molecular gastronomy movement; Alinea, El Bulli, Big Fat Duck.
Customer rating is 3 of 5  A struggle to read   2008-12-30
By Bradley Nelson (Minneapolis, MN)
As a chef with an interest in the science of cooking, I was eager to read this book. But I found it impossible. The translation from French is awkward and makes the reading slow-going. Then the topics This chooses to cover are often very peculiar and usually explained in a too-technical manner. This book is intended to explain the science of food to people who are not scientists, but it fails to put things sufficiently in laymen (or even in chef) terms.
Customer rating is 3 of 5  interestng, but seriously flawed   2008-08-10
By Lynn Hoffman, author:The Short Course in Beer (Philadelphia)
This book is one of many that points to the relationship between science and the culinary arts: to the physical and chemical magician behind the curtain of delight. A book that attempts to do that has certain responsibilities and the greatest of these may be accuracy. I lost count of the mistakes, but some of the simplest are the temperature conversions from celcius to fahrenheit. The cook attempting any of the procedures in the book should double-check the temperatures recommended and the fahrenheit-based cook should just beware.
The other important duty of such a book is clarity. Molecular Gastronomy isn't so much translated from the French as it transcribed by machine. Very often it's impossible to figure out through the haze of translation what the author is actually recommending.
On a lesser level, one could ask for a bit of originality and this book does have a bit. The level of ambition is also lamentably low: does anyone really think that putting a spoon in a champagne bottle delays the decarbonation? Are blowing and stirring the only methods of cooling over-hot coffee? How concerned are you that the yolk of your hard-boiled egg be centered in the white?
For most readers, Harold McGee's splendid On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is vastly superior.




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