Try a brand new way to make dinner
Some say cooking is an art form - that recipes are merely guidelines to what makes food delicious. You've seen it on TV: a porcine chef sweating enthusiastically over a steaming pot of jambalaya, while tossing fistfulls of spices and shouting "Wham!" (or something more trademark-friendly). Chefs like that are good at what they do - they have a feel for cooking, but good food isn't art. It's science!
What makes food delicious? Is it taste-receptors in the tongue? Can it be that all that makes food delicious is the molecular switching between guanosine diphosphate and guanosine triphosphate bound states on a G protein? Clearly that's a load of crap. Everybody knows G proteins only relate bitter and sweet tastes. We still have salty, sour and umami to cover.
All told, the five recognized "basic" tastes - sweet, salt, sour, bitter, umami - are chemical processes. Ions here, receptors there, when all balanced out create these wonderful flavors. Any chemist knows that absolute precision is required when working with chemicals. An extra mole here or there and what had been a delightfully exothermic bubbling beaker is a melted lump of glass and a trip to the eyewash station. Why shouldn't cooking be the same?
A new generation of chef-chemists have risen to take back the pinch, smidgen and fistful. They understand that an acidic fluid, when mixed with sodium alginate and dropped slowly into a bath of calcium chloride solution will create wonderful little spheres that pop in your mouth like caviar. Chill an agar infused liquid in a silicon tube and now you've got spaghetti. Mix soy lecithin in sauce and whip it into a light and delicious foam. All this science is available to your next culinary project with our Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit.
This fantastic tin box contains everything you need to get started in spherification, thickeners and foaming agents. Not only the chemicals - agar, sodium alginate, calcium chloride, carrageenan, ascorbic and citric acid, and sodium bicarbonate - but all the equipment too! A syringe, pipettes, silicon tubes, measuring spoons and a non-reactive spoon. Included in the kit is also a booklet featuring six spectacular recipes for some amazing new cuisine.
If you've ever wanted to give Molecular Cuisine a try, here's a perfect start. Once we whet your appetite, though, we can't be held responsible for weight gain, flavor overload, or an obsessive need to measure things down to the microgram.
Includes
20g sodium alginate
20g calcium salt
20g agar-agar
20g carrageenan
20g ascorbic acid
20g citric acid
20g sodium bicarbonate
20g xanthan gum
1 20mL syringe
2 m of alimentary grade silicone tube
2 graduated pipettes
1 set of measuring spoons
1 bored spoon
1 booklet containing 6 molecular cooking recipes
1 volume-weight conversion table
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