Photo taken at Stroubes by Kim Ashford.

July 2011. At Ruffino's and Stroubes, two local chefs delve into the true nature of the food they cook.

My introduction to molecular gastronomy, or to use the term its practitioners prefer, modernist cuisine, was through the whiz-bang factor these advanced techniques bring to shows like “Top Chef.” It is, from the outside, mad scientist cooking—forgoing the grill, the fridge and the saucepan for induction cookers, centrifuges, and liquid nitrogen. The results are often alien and stunning, playfully mutating the ingredients, combining them with gelling agents like agar agar to give them new form, or reducing something to foam. It looks like great fun, but is it cooking? And while we are asking the big questions: What is cooking? What are ingredients?

Two chefs here in quaint old predictable Baton Rouge have embarked on a culinary journey with modernist cuisine to explore the possible answers to these questions.

I sat at the pizza bar at Ruffino’s, watching cedar plank salmon and crème brûlée get their final touches, thumbing through a copy of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking that Chef Peter Sclafani had brought out to keep me busy while he worked his magic. Modernist Cuisine is a comprehensive five-volume tome on these techniques, and, tellingly, the book is the brainchild of Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer for Microsoft, inventor, and now CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures. Myhrvold is also a food nut. Many of his patents are in the realm of food science, so he collaborated with Chris Young of the Fat Duck (The groundbreaking modernist restaurant founded by Chef Heston Blumenthal, near Maidenhead in the U.K.) and writer/chef Maxime Bilet, seeking to create a reference on the true nature of food—not just the transformation of it through techniques. Sclafani says the book might just “become the new Bible for chefs.”

Sclafani first brought out ahi tuna served on plates made of pink Himalayan salt, topped with what he calls “soy caviar.” The rare tuna is familiar enough, expertly and delicately prepared, but the real transformation comes from its surroundings. The bottom of each piece gains an earthy organic saltiness from the plate, while the soy caviar lends the fish a sharp salinity—so that each bite refers to the sea, the fish and the preparation in stages. “Soy caviar” is actually soy sauce suspended in small globules of agar agar, a flavorless vegetable gelatin substitute made from seaweed, used to meet the sometimes unorthodox architectural demands of modernist cuisine.

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