Modernist cooking creates surge of science shops

Modernist cooking creates surge of science shops

Milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, transglutaminase, sodium citrate...

It may not sound like the last grocery list you wrote, butthe growing appeal of so-called modernist cooking — a science-tastic take onhaute cuisine — has more home cooks adding laboratory-worthy ingredients andgizmos to their shopping. And that, of course, has spawned a mini-niche ofonline companies selling everything you need to play culinary alchemist athome.

At least a half-dozen companies now sell once-elusiveingredients like sodium citrate to emulsify cheeses into creamy sauces,"popping sugar" that explodes in your mouth, and "meatglue" — transglutaminase — to create dishes like tilapia spaghetti (thatis, "spaghetti" made from tilapia). Alongside traditional equipmentlike cookie sheets and hand mixers, you can purchase pipettes to create"caviar" from various liquids or smoke torches that infuse smokeflavor into dishes without heating them up.

Even big retailers are getting in on the action.Williams-Sonoma carries machines known as "sous vide," which cookusing a warm water bath. Amazon offers ingredients such as agar agar (to makegelatins) and xanthan gum (to thicken sauces), as well as whipping siphons tocreate foams and digital scales that allow the home chef to weigh down to thehundredth of a gram. How's that for precision cooking?

Some of these sites exist solely to service your innerFerran Adria, the Spanish chef hailed as the father of modernist cooking. ChrisAnderson, a software developer by trade, launched Modernist Pantry with hiswife two years ago when he couldn't find the ingredients needed for hisculinary dabbling. Today, Modernist Pantry carries more than 300 ingredients inquantities tailored to the home kitchen, as well as equipment. The site draws60 percent of its business from home cooks, Anderson says, and sales haveincreased 10 times since launching.

"We sort of just did it initially thinking it was notgoing to be a full-time business, just a little thing on the side," hesays from the company's base in York, Maine. "But within two months wewere getting more business than we anticipated. We were doubling our salesevery month." He went full time a year ago, and today employs threepeople.

Montreal-based Molecule-R offers do-it-yourself kits for themodernist weekend warrior. Each of the company's three kits contains recipes,pre-measured sachets of the required additives and the equipment to create therecipes. The first kit hit the market in 2009, says business developmentexecutive Jennifer MacDonald, and sales since then have at least doubled.Roughly 80 percent of the customers are home cooks, she says, and they rangefrom children to seniors.

"We get families, no joke," she says. "We geta lot of people writing us and saying they did the arugula spaghetti with theirkids. It ranges from children with their parents to people in their 60s doingit."

Experimenting with modernist cuisine, sometimes calledmolecular gastronomy, is the next step in the country's love affair withcooking. In the same way that home cooks emulate what they see on the FoodNetwork, many want to replicate the gels and foams they taste at eliterestaurants like Chicago's Alinea and New York's WD-50. Aided by cookbooks suchas "Modernist Cuisine at Home," the definitive guide that waspublished last year, many accomplished home cooks have gained the confidenceand incentive to kick their basic skills up a notch.

"It's just taking a lot of really good basics andcreating something different with them," says Paul Edward, co-founder ofthe online culinary retailer Chef Rubber, whose modernist offerings account for30 percent of business. "You can take a really nice stock that you'vemade, and you can make a soup with it. Or you can make caviar or gelify it. Youcan do something really different. But at the end of the day it's just a stockand it has to be a really good one."

Barriers to entry are relatively low. Molecule-R kits costbetween $60 and $120. Chef Rubber customers spend from $75 to $150 per visit,Edward says.

"It really depends on what you want to do," saysAnderson, whose average customer spends $60 to $75 per visit. "The majorinvestment is in your time, not in ingredients. But once you get into sous videyou do need a circulator, so there's an entry cost. But most of the techniquesdon't require that much."

Many mainstream professional chefs have appropriated methodsfrom their modernist brethren. For instance, sous vide has been widely adoptedas an excellent and nearly foolproof way to cook meat. And while many if notmost of these techniques will remain too esoteric for the average home cook,certain practical elements — using the microwave to steam fish, using additivesto emulsify the sauce in macaroni and cheese — may filter into home kitchens.But probably not any time soon.

"There are things like that that are modernist cuisinetechniques," says Susan Edgerley, dining editor at The New York Times."Some of those are applicable and easy and practical and some of themaren't. There's an intersection of modernist cuisine and the home cook. I justdon't know how big it is."

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