The "Clean and Simple"

We've seen and heard a lot of molecular gastronomy-haters since the "clean and simple" trend reared it's shaggy head (just like any other hipster it could do with a shave). Roaring "I like my carrots so fresh and untouched that they're still covered in dirt" and "no additives!!!", and beating their chests with the jagged marrow-bones from which they've just pulled out of a make-shift fire, only to suck the marrow dry, fat dripping down their au natural-styled beards. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, food must be as unviolated by chefs as possible when it is served at the table. The produce must be RESPECTED for its pure and shining spirit, and chefs with their fingering and prodding are of the devil. Even if it means the spinach is unwashed.
Well, not quite. But you get my drift.

When all this has been going on I have truly wondered if any of these very vocal people have in fact ever visited a restaurant serving anything even close to the so hated and feared "molecular gastronomy". See, SVT recently ran a documentary about El Bulli. You can find it here. The focus is not so much on the day to day operations of the restaurant when it's open to customers, but rather the six months of the year during which it is closed to find and develop new dishes. As a scientist, I find their method meticulous. A product, say a carrot, is stripped down to it's bare essentials in search of the method which allows the flavor to be its sweetest, carrotiest best. It's liquidated, fried (oil and no oil) baked, broiled, sautéed, sous vide:d, dried, frozen and then all of these methods are pitted against each other just to make sure the flavor is not at its prime when it's been both baked and frozen. At all of the stages are the products tasted and photographed and a detailed log kept over both the method and the result.
Say they have been able to find a supplier of good carrots for the autumn. What to do with them? All the methods of cooking the carrots are explored until they, for example, decide on a carrot soup. Then the different methods of making carrot soup are explored until the right one is found. Then comes the question of what to serve with the carrot soup. Should it be drizzled with hazelnut oil or avocado oil? should it have a crunchy accompaniment? Which accompaniment? And the search starts all over. Then there's the quest for the right way to serve it. What bowls are the best? What spoons? What does the sommelier think?

I know of no other restaurant that makes that amount of effort to respect the produce. It's not as if the dishes are particularly complicated - it's one thing, or maybe two, with contrasting textures and maybe a contrast in temperature thrown in for fun. There aren't "additives" in the sense that the color is chemically enhanced - in fact, all the equipment, spices and techniques are things which I know you can pretty much find on Amazon. Salt, and other spices are added - if that's what you want to count as an additive.
Of course, if you booked a table at El Bulli you would have been served 40-odd courses. So yes, there would have been a lot of disparate ingredients - but not all on one plate, as some of the haters would like to make out.

The point I would like to make is that these days it's very hard to not do something that hasn't been done before (a problem the El Bulli chefs faced themselves), so pioneering a new type of cuisine is not something that happens every day. However, the techniques and methods developed by Adría and his team are something you can be sure almost every aspiring chef use on a regular basis. Even the ones claiming to serve those dirty carrots. Who was it that explored the difference in flavor to meat depending on when it is salted? Thats right. Someone interested in molecules.