KITCHEN SCIENCE: Torres puts fish into his invention, the Gastrovac

Paris, France (Wednesday, October 18, 2006) -- The baby hake on the menu at El Rodat in Javea, Spain, is a marvel of equilibrium. At once intensely flavourful and delicately light, it is the sort of exquisite dish you would expect from a chef who began his education at Barcelona's top culinary school and later apprenticed with Alain Ducasse in Paris. But the secret to Sergio Torres' fish lies less with the young chef's impressive training than with an unlikely sounding machine called the Gastrovac. The device, which both vacuum cooks foods at extremely low temperatures and infuses them with the flavours of the liquid in which they are poached, is not much to look at, but Torres is thrilled with what it does. "Look at the skin," he exclaims, pulling the hake out of the Gastrovac and plating it with a caper and red pepper broth. "It has the same sheen as it did when it was raw!"

In a Chicago restaurant they are serving chocolate pudding tied in knots; in Tokyo truffle-flavoured paper is on the menu, while in London Lawrence Wale serves parmesan ice-cream to his dinner guests.

The culinary fad for combining unlikely ingredients in avant-garde dishes is spreading round the world after being made famous by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, proprietor of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, and creator of snail porridge.

Call it the Blumenthal-Adrià effect. Ever since Europe's two famously avant-garde chefs, Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adriá, began using liquid nitrogen to freeze mousses tableside and siphons to turn squid ink into foam about five or six years ago, the walls between the laboratory and the kitchen have begun to crumble. "This is the great revolution in cooking right now: the incorporation of industrial techniques into the kitchen, and the collaboration between scientists and chefs," says José Carlos Capel, food critic for Spain's El País newspaper. The patented Gastrovac is the result of that kind of collaboration. To design it, Torres and Javier Andrés, of Valencia's well-regarded La Sucursal restaurant, joined forces with a team of scientists at Valencia's Polytechnic University. But there's a big difference to the Gastrovac's goal: while Adrià and Blumenthal routinely rely on kitchen alchemy to turn one food into another (this summer's menu at Adrià's El Bulli in Rosas, Spain, features gelatine and olive oil made into "false olives" and melon turned into caviar), the Gastrovac uses technology to make food taste more like itself.

It started with vegetables. Torres and Andrés, friends since they were teenagers, were looking for a way to cook that would, in the words of Andrés, "respect the vegetable." In 2003, their pursuit led them to the Polytechnic's Department of Food Engineering, where they knocked on several doors before finally being directed to the lab where Xavier Martínez, Purificación García and Neus Sanjuan had been working for years on vacuum cooking. At first, there was a bit of culture shock as chefs and scientists tried to adapt to each others' way of thinking. "We spent the first month just trying to agree on vocabulary," says Torres. "Were we 'cooking in a vacuum' or 'vacuum cooking'?"

Within months, however, they had completed the first prototype, an ungainly contraption whose three pieces were joined by long hoses and cables. "We called it our garage model," says Martínez, "because it looked like something a mechanic would put together." So dubious was the machine's appearance that, when the team was stopped for a road inspection on its way to present the Gastrovac at a conference in San Sebastián, they spent two hours convincing the Civil Guard that the contraption in the trunk was intended for cooking vegetables, and not, say, blowing up train stations.

The newer, sleeker version of the Gastrovac, developed earlier this year, still looks like a pressure cooker attached by rubber hose to a high-tech hot plate, but its functions are thoroughly space age. By lowering atmospheric pressure, it brings liquids to boil at temperatures much lower than normal -- 55°C for water, 80°C for oil -- while still cooking more quickly than traditional vacuum cookers. Lower temperatures and shorter cooking times keep the cellular structure -- as well as the colour, texture and nutrients -- of foods intact.

Chef Raymond Blanc favours Clifton's "sous-vide"

The technique has now moved beyond the world of expensive restaurants with the recent opening of Bacchus, Britain's first "molecular gastro-pub", in Hoxton, north London. There is also a growing band of home cooks -- including Wale, a 50-year-old business consultant, and his wife Maureen -- who have bought high-tech kitchenware to show off to guests their laboratory-developed techniques known as "molecular gastronomy".

While some purists have condemned the technique as gimmicky, Blumenthal said its growing popularity was because dining is increasingly being treated as a theatrical spectacle. "We're looking at restaurants as places of entertainment," said Blumenthal, who is a food columnist for The Sunday Times. He is perfecting black forest gateau-flavoured flying saucers, based on the rice paper-covered children's sweets. The texture of the paper is proving problematic.

Blumenthal added: "What is really exciting is that there is now so much of this information and equipment available to the personal cook at home."

The trend was begun by Ferran Adria, nicknamed the "Salvador Dali" of cooking, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Roses, Spain, named by Restaurant magazine this year as the best in the world.

Adria brought industrial and scientific methods into his kitchens and used liquid nitrogen to freeze food in front of customers' eyes. He closes El Bulli from October to March so that his chefs can develop new techniques at his laboratories in Barcelona.

Blumenthal was one of the first to take up Adria's techniques and they have now been adopted around the world. At Alinea in Chicago, Alex Stupak, the pastry chef, uses a chemical which goes into toothpaste to make chocolate dessert that can be stretched, chopped up and tied in knots but still retains a pudding texture.

The first similar restaurant in Japan opened recently at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Tokyo. The Tapas Molecular Bar offers a 15-course menu, including one consisting of a sheet of tissue paper infused with truffle flavouring.

The trend has spread in Britain, with molecular restaurants now open in cities including Leeds, Nottingham and Cambridge.

The latest invention being taken up by chefs is the Gastrovac, designed by Sergio Torres, another Spanish chef, in conjunction with scientists at Valencia Polytechnic University.

British chefs are among hundreds who have bought the device. They include John Campbell at the Vineyard in Stockcross, Berkshire. His Gastrovac offerings include baby pigeon poached in treacle.

The food and whatever liquid it is to be cooked in are placed together in the machine. The air is then sucked out, enabling cooking to occur at far lower temperatures than usual -- water, for example, boils at only 55°C in a vacuum. This preserves flavours, colours and textures that would be broken up at higher temperatures.

In a final flourish to impregnate the flavour, the chef presses a button to break the vacuum, allowing the liquid to be sucked into every pore of the food.

Some of the first Gastrovacs used in America were impounded by health officials worried that they cooked at unhygienically low temperatures.

But that's not all: by pushing a button on the Gastrovac that breaks the vacuum, the device essentially turns the food into a sponge, sucking the poaching liquid into the pores where oxygen used to be. The result is a deep, penetrating flavour, without the need for a lot of butter or oil. And because food prepared in a Gastrovac has most of its oxygen removed, it oxidizes at much slower rates; sliced Gastrovac'ed peaches and apples can last days without turning brown.

At Bacchus, 80 per cent of dishes are prepared with vacuum cookers including the Gastrovac. They include candied garlic and lemon mayonnaise sponge, black paella "paint" and iced peanut powder. Nuno Mendes, the head chef, said: "This is about breaking down barriers that people think should exist in cookery. I love to serve things people would never expect to go together."

Other gadgets that have moved from laboratories to kitchens include centrifuges -- used to create clear fruit juices -- and vacuum pumps that extract and vapourise flavours. Restaurateurs have used industrial lasers to caramelize dishes in front of diners.

A favourite with chefs is the Pacojet, which has helped the development of savoury ice-creams such as Iberian ham ice-cream with tomato seeds, offered at some top Spanish restaurants.

It works by spinning a blade at 2,000 revs per minute to shave exceptionally thin layers off frozen food. The layers accumulate to form ice-cream without having to add large amounts of cream and sugar.

Rather than the Gastrovac used by restaurants -- which can cost more than £1,000 -- Wale uses a £425 "sous-vide" water bath made by Clifton, a British company, of which hundreds have been sold to home cooks. The user vacuum packs the food in plastic bags before putting it in the cooker in a low-temperature version of boil-in-the-bag meals.

Wale recently used it to keep asparagus firm after it was cooked. At the same meal he offered an alternative gin fizz. "It consisted of lemon, sugar and gin sorbet topped with hot egg-white foam -- it's magnificent. For dessert, thin sheets of ice-cream were placed in wafers of shredded parmesan and egg whites. Nowadays, anyone can experiment with food and make fantastic, bizarre dishes."

Blumenthal's latest plans include using scented and flavoured carbon dioxide vapour to waft over diners -- one under development will immerse them in a cloud of oak moss.

"This wonderful smell billows over the whole table," said Blumenthal, adding: "Maybe I need to get out more."

Thirty-five chefs have already purchased their own Gastrovacs, including Wylie Dufresne, Joan Roca and -- no surprise -- Adrià.

The €2,900 price tag puts the device out of the reach of most non-professionals, but Marc Calabuig, director of International Cooking Concepts, which markets the Gastrovac, notes that one home cook has made the investment, and he expects more to follow. "The line between professional cooking and home cooking is blurring all the time," he says.

Although the Gastrovac clearly has show-off potential (Martínez admits his team has already tried impregnating ordinary button mushrooms with the flavour of truffles), Torres and Andrés, who call themselves "artisans," hope it will be used primarily to enhance -- not transform -- ingredients. Torres himself, for example, uses the machine to prepare desserts like cherries penetrated with vanilla and spice that still, remarkably, have the firm texture of freshly picked fruit. And Dufresne, chef at New York City's wd-50, eagerly awaits the arrival of his recently ordered Gastrovac to experiment with improving fried foods. "Tempura, for example, can be a tricky thing to make -- the vegetables can get soft; seafood can be overcooked," he explains. "With its lower temperatures, maybe we can use the Gastrovac to make a better, more foolproof tempura."

For the team at the Polytechnic, that kind of interest has been invigorating. "Usually, no one pays any attention to us," says biologist García. "But the chefs have been really interested in what we do." That said, in a department where most of the faculty are dedicated to projects like desalting cod for industrial purposes, Martínez, García and Sanjuan occasionally have to convince their colleagues of the seriousness of their work. "They think we're playing chef," says Martínez.

Still, more and more academic scientists are getting used to the idea. In Spain alone, science departments at universities in Zaragoza, Murcia, Extremadura and Granada have all recently started programs to work directly with chefs, and next year, Catalonia's Food and Science Foundation moves to its own campus. "This is not some passing fad," says Capel, referring to the collaboration. "It's about learning to treat ingredients better. And that is what cooking is all about."