Cooking is not just a chore

Since the advent of mankind, cooking has been a necessity. The early man times consisted of very crude methods of cooking mainly because the sole purpose of cooking was to suffice hunger. Times have changed and cooking has evolved into a form of art, providing a very rich and out-of the world experience. Food is forever under scrutiny to understand every ingredient and its importance in a dish.

Cooking is a blend of art and science which needs to be experimented with and refined and mastered perpetually. The whole process of studying and analysing every edible raw ingredient and its properties with respect to the colour, aroma, flavor, texture and the best method of cutting, cooking and serving requires all the senses to act at once. This is because, when we feast our eyes on a dish, all our senses are activated simultaneously. Our eyes capture the colour of the dish along with the way it is presented; nose inhales the aroma of the dish; sometimes the sizzling, stirring, whisking of the dish during the making also captivates our interest through our other sense of hearing. Hence, before our sense of taste is put into action, all the other senses play their part which will signal the brain to proceed with the dish or turn away with repugnance or disinterest.

Though we consider the world to be a small place, the type of cuisines that exist today is over-whelming. Moreover, the creation of new cuisines with a mélange of traditional ones keeps the list going on.

Molecular gastronomy is one of the advancement in the world of food science and a quick google search can tell you what it is all about. I was awe struck when I had a first-hand experience of one of the techniques of molecular gastronomy. It is called spherification – where liquid is made to undergo some sort of modern culinary process to transform it into a sphere.

 In one of the gourmet restaurants we visited last year, we were offered a very cute looking wobbly orangish-yellow ‘sphere’ on a typical Chinese soup spoon. It was a special creation by the chef in-house and the waitress went on describe that it was a mango-ginger spherification and all we had to do was just put it in our mouth and it would pop. Now that sent like 100s of questions to my mind. What does she mean by ‘pop’? Would it burst in my mouth like those popping candies which I used to love as a child? Its appearance was gelatinous with a glossy look. But what interested me most was the flavor – mango and ginger concoction. That sounded so exotic to my ears and I was trying to imagine what it would taste like. So with great anticipation, my husband and I took our respective mango-ginger spherification and slowly popped it in. What happened next was the most remarkable thing I have ever felt! Now I need to choose my words accurately to describe what I felt because it is really difficult to word it. As soon as I closed my mouth, all I felt was a very delicate crack or a tear or maybe a “pop” which was extremely gentle. It was so swift that it felt like it never really happened and then I got a tang of the mango and ginger which lasted for few beautiful seconds. The whole experience did not even last a minute, but it was so tantalising and splendid that we had to sit back and take a recount of what just happened.

For me, cooking is a beautiful experience and food science is just another world out there which has always spellbound me.