Heston Blumenthal | Ferran Adrià | Sonic | Food | artist

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6 C. Liquid Nitrogen + 3 Tbsp. Meat Glue + 1 Sonic Wave Blaster

That's part of the recipe for geek gourmet, a strange brew of science and food.
• Photograph by Fredrik Broden

An artist uses a syringe to inject a pomegranate seed into the mouths of gallerygoers. An eccentric billionaire cooks short ribs in a science-lab water bath for 40 hours. A countercultural technogeek in San Francisco stages an event during which flavored foam is spread over a bath of liquid nitrogen.

Welcome to the strange world of geek gourmet.
It's happening all around the world, inspired by a handful of genius chefs. Restaurants such as Heston Blumenthal's the Fat Duck outside of London; Ferran Adrià's El Bulli in Rosas, Spain; and Wylie Dufresne's WD-50 in New York are routinely ranked as among the best in the world, and three-star chefs flock there to see what kind of wizardry will be cooked up next. Adrià and Blumenthal practice a unique, cutting-edge
 
kind of cuisine called molecular gastronomy. Essentially, they have reinvented the cooking process, setting aside thousands of years of tradition and working from the ground up to create dishes based on the molecular compatibilities of different ingredients by using all the techniques of modern science to create flavors and textures never before experienced.