Photograph courtesy James Wojcik

In the classic heat-transfer equation, the rate of temperature change depends on how uniformly the thermal energy is distributed through an object. Overheating an egg ruins its tender essence.

Paris is sweltering, freakishly hot for an early June morning, and like much of the old city, the lab occupied by Hervé This at the Collège de France, a stone's throw from the venerable Sorbonne, has no air-conditioning. As usual, however, This—pronounced "tiss"—looks dapper in a black suit and one of the impeccable white collarless shirts that have become his trademark. A full day lies ahead in his lab, he says, but first we must shop. He bounds to his feet, ditches his jacket, and descends to the stifling street below, proceeds down a cobbled alley, crosses the boulevard Saint-Michel, rounds a corner, and dives into the local supermarché. He emerges with two dozen eggs and a cold brick of Normandy butter, his face crinkling into a grin. "For our experiments!" he announces. He has yet to break a sweat.

This is head of the molecular gastronomy group in the Collège de France's Laboratory for the Chemistry of Molecular Interactions. That's a mouthful to describe a lab that studies something simple: how the process of cooking changes the structure and taste of food. Nonetheless, molecular gastronomy marks the cutting edge of epicurism these days. Anyone who wields a saucepan is doing chemistry and physics, yet how many of us actually know what's going on in there? Molecular gastronomy aims to apply the piercing clarity of science to the culinary arts. Already in France, which takes the pleasures of the table seriously, molecular gastronomy is an officially recognized, government-funded science.

"Why molecular gastronomy?" asks This, heading off a question he's been asked many times before. "It sounds a little pompous, no? Why not . . . molecular cooking?" Easy, he replies. Cooking aims to produce a dish; it is a craft, a technique. Gastronomy is knowledge, albeit knowledge that can improve your cooking and your appreciation of it. Gastronomy is the science of anything to do with human nourishment, says This, more or less quoting Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, France's great food philosopher. Writing in 1825, Brillat-Savarin envisaged a discipline that would meld the physics and chemistry of food and cookery with the physiology of eating and especially with the glorious, sensual world of taste.


Molecular gastronome Hervé This begins his quest for the perfectly cooked egg at the local supermarket, across the street from his laboratory.

An egg's simple shape belies its complex composition. Because the yolk contains fat, it floats above the aqueous white, both in the shell and in a beaker. To achieve a centered yolk, one must rotate the egg while cooking it.

This cooks up some tubular pasta in a side experiment designed to explore food texture.

Carefully cooking an egg at 67 degrees Celsius (153°F) yields a yolk that bends to the scientist's will.
The "molecular" preface was added in the late 1980s by This and his late colleague, Nicholas Kurti, to evoke the chemical units that make up the water, fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and other compounds in food. Molecular had a dynamic, modern ring to it, perfect for ushering gastronomy into a new era. Besides, molecular gastronomy sounds so much more fun, sophisticated, and cultured than plain old "food science," a field with which it somewhat overlaps but that is largely geared to the mass-market needs of the food industry.

Not that This is a patronizing food snob. (Snobbism would be incompatible with his quest for objectivity, after all.) He would wholeheartedly agree with Brillat-Savarin that "a humble boiled egg" is as worthy of attention as "the banquets of kings." "If all you have to eat is this," he says, plucking an egg from its box and holding it between his thumb and forefinger, "it's important to cook it well."

Do we, though? The standard way to hard-boil eggs in Europe and America—10 minutes in boiling water—is not ideal, says This. The trouble, he notes clinically, is that 212 degrees Fahrenheit is far higher than the temperature at which the egg whites and the yolks coagulate. Egg whites are made up of protein and water (yolks contain fat as well). As eggs cook, their balled-up proteins uncoil into strands, and the strands bind together to form an intricate mesh that traps water. In essence, the proteins form a gel, a liquid dispersed in a solid. Boiling causes too many egg proteins to bind and form dense meshes, "so there is less sensation of water in the mouth," says This. Voilà: rubbery egg whites and sandy, grayish yolks.

The 10-minute egg is just the start of kitchen dogma. Our cookbooks are full of tips, caveats, and stipulations—précisions, as This calls them—drawn untested from tradition and folklore. "Cook meat at high temperature to seal in the juices? We've done the test—it's not true," says This. Use only eggs at room temperature for making mayonnaise? Not true either. Season steak with salt before cooking, or salt it afterward? Makes no difference, as the salt doesn't penetrate the meat. Parsing French recipes for a quarter century in his quest for gastronomic clarity, This has identified more than 25,000 such admonitions; so far only a few hundred have been investigated. So many précisions, so little time.

This, a physical chemist and a former editor of the magazine Pour La Science, first began his testing as a sideline, alone in a laboratory he'd set up at home. Then he met Kurti, the man who would become his colleague and friend. Kurti was a low-temperature physicist at Oxford University and an irrepressible bon vivant. If there is a father of molecular gastronomy, Kurti is he. Thirty-five years ago, he was already poking the probe of a thermocouple into a cheese soufflé to take its internal temperature, the better to track its vapor-assisted ascent. "We know better the temperature inside the stars than inside a soufflé," Kurti once lamented.

They must have made an odd couple: the short, rotund, Hungarian-born Kurti and the tall, dashing, much younger This. Together they formed the International Workshops on Molecular Gastronomy and began corralling colleagues keen on kitchen science: the American food scholar Harold McGee and the British physicist Peter Barham along with open-minded chefs, critics, and writers who were passionate about food and good-humored enough to put their dearly held ideas (not to mention their egos) to pitiless scientific test. As a meeting place they chose Erice, a monastic town on a Sicilian mountaintop that was already a favorite retreat for physicists like Kurti. Although Kurti died in 1998, the motley group continues to meet every few years to trade information, ideas, and occasional insults, share a few late-night glasses of the local marsala, improvise a test kitchen in a monastery courtyard, and form the foundations for a truly modern cuisine.

The workshops are dizzying affairs. Topics for the texture workshop five years ago included the biomechanics of chewing and swallowing; the structure of meat and how cooking affects it; foams and gels, featuring custards and chocolate mousses; the effects of microwaves on spongy foodstuffs like eggplants and mushrooms; and, on the last afternoon, a marathon session on the fractal nature of baba au rhum dough, conducted by a group of cantankerous physicists. "Well, that's why they are workshops, not lectures—to encourage the free exchange of ideas," This commented at the end of the day.

One participant at the texture workshop was Heston Blumenthal, a radical young British chef and the owner of the Fat Duck, near Windsor. Blumenthal was already receiving raves for the melting tenderness he coaxes out of lamb, achieved through his understanding of how heat diffuses in meat, and for the creation of a fabulous cookie—one that fizzes carbon dioxide in your mouth like so many tiny champagne bubbles. Today the Fat Duck has three Michelin stars and a biochemistry grad student in its development kitchen. Blumenthal is increasingly mentioned in the same breath as Ferran Adrià, the legendary Catalan chef at El Bulli, in Roses, two hours from Barcelona, whose superinventive and rather cerebral cuisine has drawn inspiration from the laboratory for years.

The ascent of the nerdy chef in Europe hasn't gone unnoticed in the United States. Suddenly science—once regarded with suspicion by foodies—looks like the next new thing. The term molecular gastronomy has begun popping up in restaurant reviews and on the food blog eGullet as a label for any edgy, out-there cuisine that combines unusual ingredients and employs techie gadgets.

"Because the phrase was around and catchy, it got applied to anyone experimenting with food," says McGee, an Erice regular. "Let's just say that many people aren't using molecular gastronomy to mean what Hervé means by it."