IELTSwithJurabek

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Science in the kitchen

A There is a recent movement in the world of food, in which chefs are collaborating with scientists to teach themselves the chemistry and physics of cuisine. Even academics are getting excited about the results. Colin Osborne of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London is enthusiastic: "Chefs are using unusual methods to produce exciting dishes that would be impossible without modern science," he says. You may wonder what's wrong with long established culinary traditions. The fact is, many culturally ingrained cooking methods are less than perfect. Osborne gives the example of the common belief that frying meat seals in moisture, while researchers who weighed the meat actually found that moisture is lost in the process. Another example is the age old technique of adding salt when boiling vegetables to raise the water's boiling point, thus cooking the vegetables faster. In fact, the amount of salt typically added does not raise the temperature significantly, or improve the flavour, since only a minuscule amount is absorbed.

B Herve This, director of the Molecular Gastronomy team at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, spends much of his time trying to disprove culinary old wives' tales. He is empirically testing traditional beliefs about cooking and disproving the more absurd, tackling such questions as whether it's better to add vinaigrette to potato salad while the potatoes are still hot. "The first modern chemists used kitchen equipment to do their experiments," Herve This explains. "Since then, chemistry has undergone massive changes, but cooking methods have remained largely as they were in the Middle Ages."

C "It's seriously important work," says Peter Barham, a physicist at Bristol University. "If you understand what's going on in cooking, you'll be better equipped to improve it." Barham contends that it's difficult to get consistent results from cookery books, because recipes are typically poorly written. In stark contrast, he notes, scientific papers are subject to peer review, whereby experts pore over experiments to ensure they can be accurately reproduced.

D Barham also collaborates with leading British chef Heston Blumenthal, proprietor of The Fat Duck, a restaurant in the south of England. The restaurant is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, serving delightfully unexpected dishes such as nitro scrambled egg and bacon ice cream.

E When Simon Campbell of the Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an honorary fellowship on Blumenthal for creative applications of science to cooking, he said: "The scientific community admires and respects the research that Mr Blumenthal has performed to harness cuisine to science. Through his inquisitive and innovative approach to food he has underlined spectacularly how chemistry permeates all aspects of texture, taste and smell."

F Although some dishes sound gimmicky, this innovative approach to cooking is paying off. El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain, directed by chef Ferran Adria, is another leading restaurant thus enthusiastically engaging with scientific techniques. It closes for six months of the year, to allow six months for research and development, yet is rumoured to be booked out for an entire year in advance.

G Such restaurants are part of the movement known as molecular gastronomy, an expression coined by physicist Nicholas Kurti, working in collaboration with Herve This. Kurti once quipped that "it is a sad reflection that we know the temperature inside the stars better than the temperature inside a souffle." Kurti and Herve This devised the expression molecular gastronomy during the 1980s to denote the science of culinary transformations and eating phenomena, and differentiate it from food science.

H "Twenty years ago the worlds of science and cooking were neatly compartmentalised," agrees author Harold McGee, a top food science writer. "There was food science: an applied science mainly concerned with understanding the materials and processes of industrial manufacturing. And there was the world of domestic and restaurant cooking, traditional crafts that had never attracted much scientific attention."

I A lot has changed in the two decades since he published his influential book on the topic. In a revised edition, McGee says the book was "riding a rising wave of general interest in food, a wave that grew and grew, and knocked down the barriers between science and cooking, especially in the last decade. Science has found its way into the kitchen, and cooking into laboratories."

J So what does the future hold? Rachel Edwards Stuart is a graduate PhD student who is studying some remarkable food additives, including modified cellulose gels that solidify on heating and melt again as they are cooled. The idea is to make dishes that develop different flavours as they are eaten. Her other project is creating drinks that change flavour.

K "The concept came from Roald Dahl's children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Willy Wonka makes a bubble gum that is a whole meal in one sweet," she says. Unfortunately, Edwards Stuart was unable to say more, due to a confidentiality agreement with the restaurant for which she conducts her research.

L While Herve This, Blumenthal and Edwards Stuart are the pioneers, the next phase will be to bring science into kitchens at home. Already there are books that provide an insight into the wondrous chemistry that turns humble ingredients into cuisine. And as the movement grows it will not be long before we see laboratory test tubes, flasks and maybe the odd centrifuge on sale next to carving knives, rolling pins and pressure cookers.