THE SUNDAY TIMES:

Michelin chef's formula for future of fine dining
Adam Sage in Paris
Take some ascorbic acid and add a little glucose. Throw in a hint of citric acid and mix it with a few grams of 4-O-a-glucopyranosyl-D-sorbitol, a sugar substitute otherwise known as maltitol.

This is the taste sensation that will reach Hong Kong today, where the celebrated French chef Pierre Gagnaire will push back culinary boundaries with what is being described as the world's first entirely synthetic gourmet dish.

Mr Gagnaire, who has three Michelin stars, has worked for months with Hervé This, the founder of molecular gastronomy, to create the recipe — entitled le note à note — from chemical compounds.

The result, he says, is a starter of jelly balls tasting of apple and lemon; creamy on the inside and crackling on the outside.

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“It is good,” he told The Times ahead of today's lunch at his restaurant in Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental hotel. “It's going to be smooth, crusty and frosty.” The meal will include a lobster fricassée served with polyphenol sauce, another Gagnaire-This invention, made of tartaric acid, glucose and polyphenols.

Mr This, a chemist specialising in food science, is touting the meal — for which all tables have been reserved — as a step into the future of haute cuisine. Tomorrow's chefs will frown upon plain vegetables, such as carrots, he says, and will instead use the molecules which make up carrots — caroteniods, pectins, fructose and glucuronic acid.

“If you use pure compounds, you open up billions and billions of new possibilities,” Mr This said. “It's like a painter using primary colours or a musician composing note by note.”

He says compound cooking will enthral our taste buds — or, rather, our trigeminal nerve — and help to end food shortages and rural poverty because farmers could increase profitability by “fractioning their vegetables”.

Critics will complain that none of the ingredients in le note à note is what they might call natural.

Mr This has little time for such thinking. “Sugar is not natural. Chips are not natural. They are both artificial. And if you tried to eat a wild carrot, you'd find it disgusting.”

Man has refined, modelled and selected these foodstuffs into edible commodities, he argues — so why not go a stage further and break them down into chemical compounds, which are “better allies for chefs than brute vegetable and animal products? It is a question of common sense in terms of culinary technique”.

Mr This is hailing culinary constructivism, as he describes the discipline, as the next stage in the appliance of science to the kitchen after molecular gastronomy. His earlier work involved the input of chemistry and physics into cuisine — inspiring the likes of Heston Blumenthal.

Now Mr This wants to go further, revolutionising everything from ingredients to recipes. But even Mr Gagnaire, his most fervent supporter, says that is a far-flung ambition.

“We are working for future generations,” the chef said. “Hervé is a companion and a friend. He sends me a technique every month and I use it as the basis for a recipe. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But he's not my guru. He comes up with ideas, but I have to supply the poetry.”

The difference between the chef and the chemist is illustrated well by the recipe for polyphenol sauce: Mr This would have it made with triacylglycerol. Mr Gagnaire uses butter.

The chemist’s cookbook

Melt 100g of glucose and 20g of tartaric acid in 20cl of water. Add 2g of polyphenol. Boil and add sodium chloride and piperine. Bind the sauce with amylose. Take off the heat and stir in 50g of triacylglycerol