Maybe we should call it sci-fi cooking

Barely cooked but warm, the oyster was coated in a smooth juniper jelly that exaggerated its bulges and curves, made shiny by edible titanium and dubbed “Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao”. Gourmet contributing editor Francis Lam reflects on eating an oyster by the chef Quique Dacosta, and on some amazing meals ingested under the theme of "molecular gastronomy." I randomly stumbled upon this FT article today that turned out to be the source of the quote I posted yesterday. And so you may be aware Lam doesn't care for the term molecular gastronomy.

So I’ve just been calling it sci-fi cooking. I don’t know why I called it that at first, it just kind of sounded fun. But writing this, a thought occurred to me: science fiction, at its heart, does not aim to show us what might be made possible by technology, but what we might make technologically possible by our values.

The truly exciting thing about this cuisine is not what the techniques and the technology can do. It’s that it shows us what the mind can do, what new rules we can make, what new logic, what new possibilities.

I kinda like that, sci-fi cooking. Perhaps I will use that from now on as I continue to write and explore this new frontier of cooking. And it goes without saying, I would very much like to eat Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao!

Posted on May 18, 2007

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