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Chef
The common belief that searing a steak will “lock in the juices” has been debunked by food scientists, yet some chefs persist in this practice. Watch » Chef Wylie Dufresne believes in playing with his food—but not in the usual sense of the phrase. In his Big Think interview, Dufresne explains the oft-misunderstood field of molecular gastronomy. It isn't just experimentation for experimentation's sake, he says: knowing about food chemistry will make anybody a better cook. Dufresne says that thanks to recent applications of science to the culinary world, we've learned more about cooking in the past 15 years than we had in the previous 15,000 years. One famous misconception, for instance, is that searing a piece of meat seals in the juices, when in fact molecular gastronomy has shown that making a slab of meat too hot will begin to draw the moisture out rather than seal it in. Dufresne also weighs in on the great foam debate in cooking, saying that foam has gotten a bad rap. "Engaging something in a new way, whether it be vinegar or butter or a flavor, but carrying it in a new form, is often very exciting to me." He also says that the "farm to table" movement is "like smoke and mirrors for the diner"—in fact, all good restaurants should be using good ingredients without needing to scream that fact from the top of a soap box. Finally, Dufresne says Scandinavia is the next big culinary hot spot. "They're introducing us, the culinary world, to a whole new group of ingredients that we are unfamiliar with. They're exposing us to a an approach, to a style of cooking, that has been around for a long time, but we're seeing it come back into vogue."
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