Saturday, June 25, 2005

Was Ferran Adria using a Biochemical Engineering technique, or was he just cooking?

Every day, I think, I have this mind-blowing moment of realization. It's a kind of shock that you get at trying to grasp something so mind-blowingly innovative that you teeter on the verge of the realization that there are people out there, that you may not know of, who are innovating things so far-out exciting this very moment even as we speak, that you may get to hear about maybe a few months or a few years later. We live in very exciting times, and this is what gets me up every morning.

Today's is definitely the discovery of an experiment written by a scientist in the Chemical Engineering department in the University of Maryland called "Enzyme Entrapment in Alginate Gel" which Drazick of Draz's Kitchen came across and showed me. The shocking thing is... the scientific procedure outlined in the experiment to entrap any enzyme in alginate gel is almost the exact same procedure carried out by Ferran Adria when making mango and apple caviar.

I cannot nearly articulate how mind-blowing this realization is. Either to attempt to understand how serious Ferran Adria is about his experiments into pushing the boundaries of possibility with fine dining and cooking - even down to the very definition of cooking - or being amazed at how an experiment conducted in a lab so many thousands of miles away from Spain can be used in an application probably unimagined by the inventor.

Either way, it reaffirms that the things we do are never truly and completely ignored or forgotten. Whether Ferran Adria (more to follow about this new cool guy in my life) had read the experiment and subsequently decided on its application to making mock caviar, or he had come upon the technique by himself in his own experiments in his food laboratory is irrelevant. The truth is that our little discoveries accumulate in small victories to become the culminating successes of our individual lives.

(Did I just go really way over the top in that post?)

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