A new wave of cooking brings culinary surrealism to your tables. As chefs warm to molecular gastronomy, sample a world where nothing is the way it tastes
How do you drink a salad? Smoke a dessert? Sip a gulab jamun? The common sense answer to those questions: are you off your rockers? But Chef Sharad Dewan of The Park in Kolkata would rather take us beyond common sense. So, first, he offers us slices of tomato and mozzarella cheese. While we nibble, he wheels in three glasses of what looks like shots of Bloody Mary, topped with cream. “Tomato mozzarella salad,” he announces with a flourish. The base is full-bodied tomato juice with basil oil and topped with a white foam of mozarella. The tomato seems tangier, the cheese creamier. All the old flavours, transformed into bizarre textures and shapes.

That, for you, is the world of molecular gastronomy, a new wave of cooking that is finding followers in a handful of India’s top chefs. Where food is deconstructed, stretched and prodded with the help of chemical compounds till it assumes new dimensions. Where familiar ingredients can be turned into jellies, foams, purées and powders. Where you make crabmeat-flavoured ice cream, or taste beef and chicken in the same slab of steak, thanks to a thing called meat glue. Where you can make caviar without salmon roe.
Yes, sirree. A month ago, the day’s special at the Smoke House Grill in Delhi was beetroot caviar. A day before, the restaurant’s senior sous chef Mayank Tiwari cruised down to a chemist shop in Daryaganj and bought capsules of different chemicals along with a handful of syringes. At his kitchen, Tiwari blended together portions of beetroot extracts and sulphur dioxide and slowly poured out droplets of the thick blend into a bowlful of cold calcium chloride. As the trickle of purple puree entered the bath, it broke into a shower of globules. Filtered and rinsed in water, beetroot caviar was ready to eat.

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