The US foodie bible, Gourmet, voted Alinea in Chicago the best restaurant in America, a remarkable achievement for its 30-year-old chef, Grant Achatz, given that it had been open for only a year. Alinea is famed not simply for the inventive dishes on its 24-course tasting menus, but also for the ways in which they are presented. Ingredients come to the table impaled on hyper-thin metal prongs, created by the restaurant's consultant sculptor, or dangling from what appear to be chrome executive toys. A piece of lamb arrives buried beneath smouldering eucalyptus leaves, and a single ravioli has a liquid centre that is the very essence of truffle.
www.alinea-restaurant.com
B is for Heston Blumenthal
The Man as far as this country is concerned. Prior to opening the Fat Duck in 1995, Blumenthal had spent only a week in a professional kitchen, at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. Today he has three Michelin stars. His friend and fellow chef, the great Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in Spain, has paid him the ultimate compliment: one of his dishes often appears on the menu at El Bulli, credited to Blumenthal. He is the only chef to have been so honoured.
www.thefatduck.co.uk
C is for flavour combination
One of the defining motifs of future food is unexpected flavour combinations, be it hazelnut cannelloni Pavlova with beef at l'Enclume in the Lake District, braised turbot with peanuts and vanilla at Midsummer House or caviar and white chocolate at the Fat Duck. It may sound weird, but in the right hands these dishes can make you look at ingredients anew.
D is for desiccation
The future food kitchen is a restless place, forever in search of new techniques with which to improve their dishes. Often they'll look to the chemistry lab, which is where the desiccator - generally used for dehydration - came from.
E is for El Bulli
Ferran Adrià's Spanish restaurant is regarded as the place for anybody interested in the avant garde. El Bulli's team, largely staffed by devotees working for free, creates dozens of new dishes every year, all of which are now catalogued both in books and online. They are open only during the summer months and this year got 800,000 requests for tables. Don't even think of trying to book: the 2007 season is already full.
F is for foams
Once they were only on the top of your cappuccino. Now they are on everything. Try the green apple foam at Bacchus in London or the parmesan air at Anthony's in Leeds. Want to make your own? Just get a light stock, add a little cream and beat the hell out of it with a hand-held, battery-powered cappuccino beater. Et voila: foam. You too are now on the cutting edge of the culinary avant garde.
G is for Gastrovac
Already a big hit in Spain, the Gastrovac is, depending upon who you talk to, either the greatest thing to hit kitchens since fire, or just a glorified pressure cooker. It allows ingredients to be cooked at low temperature in a vacuum. In theory when the vacuum is broken, any flavours from a stock will flood into the main ingredient. There is one big difference between it and a pressure cooker, though: the Gastrovac costs £2,000.
www.cookingconcepts.com
H is for Harold McGee
Originally an English literature professor at Yale University in the US, Harold McGee became increasingly interested in the science of cookery and is the author of what is regarded as the future food movement's bible, On Food & Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, published in 1984. It was the first mainstream book to detail what happens when food is cooked, and was the one that got Heston Blumenthal interested in the subject. You can read McGee's writings at curiouscook.com.
I is for ice cream
Forget vanilla and tutti-frutti. Think Roquefort, grain mustard and even crab flavour. If it can be added to cream and churned it can be made into ice cream. And at some point it probably will be.
J is for jellies
The modern kitchen became really excited by jellies with the introduction in the 1990s of new gelling agents like agar, a seaweed extract, which stay solid at much higher temperatures and opened the way for warm jellies. Try the mouth-filling hot langoustine jelly served with chervil cream at Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham.
www.lechampignonsauvage.co.uk
K is for Nicholas Kurti
The late Nicholas Kurti, a Professor of physics at Oxford University who worked on the atom bomb project during World War II, was also a keen amateur cook. In 1969, Kurti gave a lecture at the Royal Institution called 'The Physicist in the Kitchen', which is regarded as the first moment when the science of cookery was investigated with any seriousness. Among Kurti's creations were a reverse baked Alaska, which was frozen on the outside and hot on the inside.
L is for low-temperature cooking
In the old days we roasted the hell out of pieces of meat to make them tender. Now we know that a long spell in the oven at low temperatures of around 50°C will produce much better results. In his TV series Perfection Blumenthal (see also B) cooked a piece of beef for 24 hours, and rested it for a further four, before sealing it in a blazing hot pan for about 90 seconds. Aga fans were right all along.
M is for molecular gastronomy
In the early 1990s a new centre for scientific and cultural studies was opened in Sicily. Hearing that workshops were being given over to all sorts of scientific research, Nicholas Kurti (see K, above) proposed conducting research into cookery. The centre's directors were unimpressed. They couldn't investigate something as banal as cookery. OK then, Kurti said. How about if we call it molecular gastronomy? Kurti was given space in which to conduct his research and a term - which means absolutely nothing - was coined.
N is for liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen is so cold it freezes almost anything instantly, which can make for some interesting restaurant theatre. At his Tapas Molecular Bar in Tokyo, chef Jeff Ramsey uses it to flash-freeze desserts.
O is for osmosis
As any biology student will tell you, osmosis is the process by which water passes through a membrane to dilute a solution - say, of salt - on the other side. This desire to understand the nuts and bolts of processes like osmosis distinguishes the future food chef from his classically trained colleagues.
P is for Pacojet
Until the arrival of the Pacojet if you wanted to make a sorbet you first had to create a sugar solution of a particular density, otherwise, when frozen and churned, your sorbets would be full of crunchy ice crystals. This meant sorbets had to be sweet. With a Pacojet, however, you make a purée of your chosen flavour, then freeze it. Inside the Pacojet is a blade which spins at high speeds, whizzing the block of ice into a smooth soft mush that approximates to a sorbet. Welcome, then, to basil sorbet, jasmine tea sorbet, even sardines-on-toast sorbet. From around £2,000.
www.pacojet.com
Q is for quinoa
Quinoa is a grain, often associated with the Andes where it grows easily, with a fluffy light texture and a slightly nutty flavour. Although it has been cultivated for thousands of years, it's a novelty to most Western restaurant-goers, which makes it a shoo-in for inclusion on any future food chef's menu.
R is for revolution
Which is exactly what we are in the middle of right now.
S is for sous-vide
The vacuum-packing of food, as a means of preservation, has been around for years. Increasingly, though, chefs are using it to cook ingredients, vacuum-packing them first with seasonings, then heating them very gently in low-temperature water baths. The result can be cuts of fish and meat with a very even soft texture. Increasingly, sous-vide machines are turning up in kitchens that do not regard themselves as being on the future food agenda. What not to say: 'Oooh, it's just like boil-in-the-bag!'
T is for Thermomix
Your food processor at home cuts as it mixes as it dices. The Thermomix (£640) goes one better. It cooks too. That means you can knock up those all-important cappuccino-style foams on your soups. (It also happens to be bloody good for baby food.)
www.ukthermomix.com
U is for Umami
Although known about in the East for many years, umami, best described as savouriness, is a major part of various culinary traditions. Yet only recently has it been accepted in the West as the fifth taste alongside salt, sweet, sour and bitter. Seaweeds are a great source of umami, and, with increasing interest in Japanese ingredients, are used regularly to boost the savoury flavour profile.
V is for Mark Veyrat
The French chef has two restaurants, one in the mountains at Megève during the winter, the other down by the lake at Annecy for the summer. He has a reputation for using wild herbs and flowers from the pastures around his restaurants (both of which have three Michelin stars) and also for the whizz-bangery with which his food is then served at the table. Diners are as likely to be asked to inject their dinner with a syringe of sauce as they are to use a knife and fork. Think celery ravioli with a zabaglione of lovage, crayfish sorbet with asparagus chantilly, and orange jelly or grapefruit fritters in nitrogen with tonka bean gnocchi.
La Ferme de Mon Père, route du Crêt, 74210 Megève (00 33 4 50 21 01 01);
La Maison de Marc Veyrat, 13 Vieille route des Pensières, 74290 Veyrier du Lac (00 33 4 50 60 24 00)
W is WD-50 and Wylie Dufresne
Wylie Dufresne was one of the first chefs in the US to get on to the future food agenda at his hyper-cool Manhattan restaurant WD-50. It's the place for deep-fried mayonnaise (served in cubes), for powders of peanut butter or olive oil which reconstitute in the mouth and for rack of lamb with a banana consommé.
wd-50.com
X is for xanthan gum
Xanthan gum is a thickener and one of a number of ingredients which have found their way from industrial food production into the future food kitchen, where it can be used as an alternative to cornflower.
Y is for yuzu
...and all the other Japanese ingredients - mirin, miso, ponzu, daikon - which have found their way on to the menus of chefs trying to push the boundaries. Yuzu is basically a Japanese alternative to lemons, and a dash of yuzu on a menu makes a dish sound way sexier, and suggests that the chef is an enlightened soul.
Z is for zein
A protein found in maize, zein is made in powdered form and used as a filmy coating for encapsulated foods like nuts or fruits. At the Fat Duck they serve zein films flavoured with oak moss and leather.
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