Week 11: Molecular - Seared Scallops with Soy Sauce Foam and Carrot Ginger Pearls [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Molecular Cuisine, also known as Molecular Gastronomy or Modernist Cuisine, is style of cooking that involves the use of innovative methods, techniques and equipment in order manipulate foods in never before seen ways. Chefs across the country and globe have embraced these techniques to excite diners for years, but in the past decade the style has really started to proliferate. Nathan Myhrvold, the original Chief of R&D at Microsoft published Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking a few years ago, and is the end-all-bee-all tome of food science. The series also contains countless recipes for molecular cooking. While the $600 price tag can be daunting, the also offer a home version at a much lower rate, as well as a bunch of recipes on their website. Paste Magazine has also done an article with some great entry-level molecular recipes.

While not molecular in and of itself, one of the most iconic techniques of Modernist Cuisine is cooking food sous-vide: Food is vacuum sealed in a plastic bag, and cooked at a precise time and temperature to achieve maximum flavor and ideal texture. Sous-vide not only requires the use of a vacuum sealer, but an immersion circulator, which will heat and circulate water to a precise temperature. Traditional circulators can run upwards of $1000, but home-model verisons such as the Sansaire, Anova, and Nomiku run between $200-$300. If you want to try sous-vide but that price is still a little steep, Amazon sells Ziploc Vacuum Bags that are great for sealing your foods and a slow-cooker or crock-pot hold low temperatures incredibly well. If you're a gadget junkie, you can even try building your own immersion circulator. For additives and chemicals, Modernist Pantry and Amazon both carry a wide range of ingredients for any number of different techniques.

I was a little nervous about how my (lack of) molecular gastronomy skills would turn out, so I decided to cook one of my staples and add some molecular goodness on top.  The scallops are simply seared in olive oil.  I took the recipe for the carrot ginger pearls from here and used the soy sauce foam recipe from Modernist Cooking Made Easy.

I do have to say, the pearls/caviar were SO MUCH fun to make.  I got a little carried away.  All said though, I don't think my meal was drastically elevated by the addition of molecular science - it really was just a fun novelty add-on.  Plus, the ingredients and tools needed were definitely the most I've had to spend on a challenge so far.