Modernist Cousine - brilliant future or pure bullshit?

I have been a hobby chef for ages. I have waded through the classics and been euphoric over local traditional dishes. But now I have become hooked on something new. It is called Modernist Cuisine. I have for some time been curious about this new thing, and I have and have read both the Fat Duck Cookbook and A Day At El Bulli. The Fat Duck is the famous and innovative restaurant of famous chef Heston Blumenthal. This little restaurant in the little village of Bray in England has for many years been one of the most inventive places to chew the fat. El Bulli, led by chef Ferran Adrià was for many years the restaurant that defined the new way of cooking. They closed a few years ago, but their legacy lives on.

When I got frightfully old last birthday, I were given presents that catapulted me into this new and exciting world of food. A sous vide machine and the tour de force of the topic: the book Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Or books. These five volumes total 2438 pages and weigh more than 23 kilos. I really don't know what to expect from this massive source of information. Many food enthusiasts have heard about these books, many wonder what they are, but few have read them. But now they are securely placed on the bottom shelf of my kitchen book shelf, and my intension is to read all of it. Or at lest almost all of it. And I assume that these pages will give me all the information to be had about this new and marvellous Modernist Cuisine. And I will try to write something about my findings as I harvest and hopefully utilise all this new information.

So what is modernist cuisine, anyway? After checking around the web a bit I found that many people have serious doubts about it. According to popular beliefs, modernist cuisine is all about making strange food using strange, possibly harmful ingredients and chemicals and strange, hi-tech equipment. And because of all this strangeness, one should not venture into it.

But from what I have gathered, modernist cuisine is about

• moving the art of cooking forward by removing as many compromises as possible from the cooking process
• exploring new ideas in food, challenging the ideas of what textures specific elements should have or indeed what those elements are, utilising new ingredients in the search of new textures and flavours

Cooking has always been developing. If people had not tried out new ideas, nothing of what we now consider traditional food would exist. And does really chemical belong in the kitchen? Well, they have been in the kitchen for ages, like baking soda or vinegar. And for strange, new equipment, we have already let the electric stove, blender and microwave oven into the kitchen, so why stop there?

So the way I see it, modernist cuisine is nothing more than another step in the evolution of cooking, perhaps using new ingredients and equipment, but nothing more outrageous than the new stuff we are already using. And as such, should we not pursue it? If there are new, exiting and possibly better ways of preparing food, should we not at least try them, and if they work, embrace them?

I say yes. It may not be the brilliant future, but it is absolutely part of the future, and it may even be a bit better. And more exiting. Time to start reading. 2438 pages are waiting.