Grant Achatz on the State of New Cooking

[slkinsey]

Grant Achatz has apparently been writing some columns for The Atlantic about his experiences in and reactions as he attended Madrid Fusión 2009.

So far there are three articles. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

These have some interest, but part 3, entitled "The Thrill of the Gel Is Gone" is the most interesting and provocative. Among other things (I note that he uses the term "molecular gastronomy" unapologetically) he decries what he perceived as a "lack of inspiration" and even muses on whether we might be seeing the beginnings of the end of this wave of cooking.

Some interesting quotes for consideration:

Historically, it has always been the scholars, the public, and the media who have had the responsibility to describe the precise meaning, characteristics, and bookends of a period, whether it is in the arts, politics, industry or otherwise.

When I look closely at the creative paths that have catapulted modern cooking into popularity and controversy in recent times, a few seem to have become the defining elements. The most popular seems to be looking to industrial mass food production for inspiration.

Most provocatively:

My passion is cooking and food. Everything I experience I relates back to those two things. So when I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket that has a liquid center of gel, I wonder how it was produced and if I can create a similar sensation at Alinea. I am certainly not the only one who thinks this way, and it is obvious to me that this is how the use of hydrocolloids, modified starches, gums, pectin, and other such ingredients found their way into the professional chef's kitchen.

This was a revelation for the modern chef. Suddenly we had a seemingly endless source of inspiration at our disposal. We had a pantry of ingredients that could do the impossible, transforming ingredients in ways never before possible.

It was difficult to see this at the time, but the breadth of this wave was quite narrow. When you really look at the techniques critically, the results are all versions of textural transformation involving liquids.

But what happens when the wow factor of a hot gelatin wears off? Or the mystery of how a liquid creates a wrapper from itself, its walls gelling to hold the still aqueous center inside? We roll into variations of themes.

[gfron1]

Thanks for pointing these out Sam. Over at Khymos.org, a similar discussion occurred a couple of months ago talking about the "plateau of productivity."

I know that for me, preparing MG meals just a half dozen times each year, I am already finding certain techniques in their pure form boring and quite frankly, silly. I can't imagine cranking about 100 orbs a night, day after day, week after week. It must feel like the actor in the Goofy costume at Disneyland trying to make the kid who is seeing Goofy for the first time smile every single day.

I want to let everyone have the experience of the discovery of MG meals, but what then? To me the future is not in food technology, but other technologies, and then the ultimate integration of MG techniques back into "normal" cooking. Of course these are not new or novel ideas, but ones that feel closer by the day.

[docsconz]

I think that the days of technique for its own sake are behind us, however, that does not mean that technique will suddenly become unimportant or that the novel techniques developed over the last twenty years or so will disappear. They will stay and new ones will continue to be developed and highlighted, but there will be a greater emphasis on the the overall sensory pleasures of the final product. The spherical olive developed at elBulli and used so well by Andres will continue to be popular because it is soooo good. Frank Bruni, in his recent article on Bazaar by Jose Andres in the NYT raved about them. I read somewhere, but can't recall who wondered why Andres served real olives alongside the spherical ones when the spherical ones were so much better! Sous vide or other low temperature cooking methods aren't going anywhere anytime soon. They've become the dominant form of cooking proteins and even many vegetables in many top restaurants. Even the much decried foams seem to have established themselves as a useful adjunct.

New techniques will still be developed and featured, though perhaps not to the gimmicky extent that many have been in the recent past, where some chefs felt that they had to show that they were au courant. The techniques will likely play more supporting roles, but there will always be a premium for succesful and real creativity.

[jvalentino]

Thanks for posting these.

Maybe the algination of everything for the sake of alginating will soon be over.

Jeff

[Endy']

New techniques will still be developed and featured, though perhaps not to the gimmicky extent that many have been in the recent past, where some chefs felt that they had to show that they were au courant. The techniques will likely play more supporting roles, but there will always be a premium for succesful and real creativity.

←

Maybe the algination of everything for the sake of alginating will soon be over.

←

I imagine so. After all, foie gras has long passed from the territory of "let's show off how avant garde we are by serving the same seared foie gras dish as everyone else" to a useful ingredient that makes useful appearances without being pervasive or tiresome.

[Timh]

When in doubt, WWAD?

(What will Adria do?)

[slkinsey]

Well, I think it's interesting that these things are all coming on top of each other, such as Albert Adrià leaving elBulli, and some talk that the restaurant may not persist for more than a few more years, etc.

It seems clear to me that certain elements of these techniques and approaches will persist. Things that seemed completely novel at first, such as foams, to make the easy example, have become part of standard cookery to such an extent that the neighborhood "American casual bistro" in my neighborhood has had some dishes with a foam. Similarly, sous vide techniques and the use of Activa and similar products will no doubt become increasingly standard.

What I wonder (and perhaps what Achatz is wondering) is whether the "gee wiz" and "shock and awe" transformative/whimsical aspects of this new scientifically informed cooking will persist for much longer, or whether this will begin to seem a bit trite after a while.

To make a very broad and hypothetical example, 5 years ago if I were to have a dish of rice and beans where the "rice" was actually made out of beans and the "beans" were made out of rice, I would have thought it was one of the most amazing and interesting things I'd ever had. Now? <Shrug> Not so much.

A comparison might be to the introduction of ubiquitous and affordable synthesizers into popular music. In those days, there were any number of groups out there that were 90% synthesizer, which did many interesting things exploring the opportunities afforded by this technology and which were very up-front about wanting to surprise the listeners with new sounds and wanting to make clear to listeners that these sounds were not made by the traditional instruments of pop music. One might equate this musical movement with where we are now with technology- and science-driven cuisine. After a while, though, the practical boundaries of synthesizer-driven popular music had been explored sufficiently and for a long enough period of time that it started to lose some of its appeal and ceded the cutting edge to other kinds of popular music. Synthesizers are still around in popular music today, as are many of the same ideas and techniques that came out of that early flowering of synthesizer-driven pop. But they have more or less been integrated into the various kinds of popular music that we have today. There really is no overtly synthesizer-driven pop music today like there was in 1984. It strikes me that this could also happen with today's elBulli/Alinea style of cooking. This wouldn't take away any of the validity of what they're doing or have done. But, of course, today's popular music doesn't take away any of the validity of what Devo was doing in the early 1980s.

[docsconz]

I think that is a very interesting and apt analogy, Sam.

[philadining]

I agree, Sam: you've made an apt analogy, and I'll just extend it to say that even today, there are still musicians making very interesting and beautiful music with synthesizers as the focus. There are also plenty of sincere, scruffy rock bands with a synth player, and loads of synths at the core of huge pop hits. (And plenty of musicians that see them as evil.) But you're right that it's not a trendy element that everyone feels obliged to use, or call attention to.

And similarly, I suspect there will always be a niche audience for a chef going full speed ahead with gels and powders and vacuums, just as there remains one for musicians twiddling the knobs of modular synths. But that narrow specialty won't be the main outcome of the movement, nor will there be outright rejection of the techniques. There'll be a push-back (we're probably in that phase already) then a quiet integration of the useful parts to the degree that we just won't think about it.

But yes, I agree, probably fewer keyboardists wearing capes.

[paulraphael]

What Grant is really talking about is the double-edged sword of novelty. Everything is new once. Some new things are startlingly different from what's gone before them. But if their primary value lies in that newness, then they have an automatic expiration date.

Ultimately only history can separate revolution from mere novelty. What people in the culinary avant garde are discovering is that truly revolutionary discoveries are a rarity.

Another thing we're witnessing is chefs embodying the role of artist in a more pure form than in the past. And they don't have much sense of how to do it. I can tell from Grant's essays that he hasn't really absorbed the structure of 20th and 21st century art history and how he fits into it (he fits into it cleanly). But he hasn't yet even found the vocabulary to express it.

For instance he's calling his cuisine "modern," when that would be a better description of Nouvelle Cuisine 50 years ago. Grant and Adria (and to a certain degree Keller) could be described, at least partially, as postmodernists. Their blurring of boundaries, affinity for deconstruction, and their embrace of both pop culture and high culture references is textbook 1980s postmodernism.

But I think even that misses the core of what they're doing. Goofy expressions like "molecular gastronomy" miss it by a mile. What strike me as the key is their commitment to reinvention. Alinea tries to never repeat dishes on the menu. El Buli tries to reinvent their entire approach to cooking every season. Given this commitment, I think the most fitting art historical term for this kind of cooking is "avant garde." It's not a stylistic description; it's a position statement regarding your relation to tradition. What's avant garde today will be "garde" tomorrow; that's why Adria and Achatz won't be doing the same thing tomorrow.

Grant is just discovering that a certain category of techniques, ones mostly gleaned from food industry and mostly concerned with textural manipulations, aren't new anymore. The ones that were interesting because they were new are obviously no longer interesting. But even the ones that have lasting value are going to be of limited interest to an avant gardist ... because he's been there, done that.

I suspect what's troubling Grant is ultimately that he's been defined by a certain style of cooking (and possibly even participated in that definition), while his avant garde inclinations actually require him to be free from any stylistic constraints.