A Set Of Cooking Tools To Make Molecular Gastronomy Easy
Dublin-based designer Ahmad Fakhry creates utensils that invite diners to play with their food.
If Julia Child demystified the art of cooking, molecular gastronomists have done their best to make haute cuisine an obscure science. But the latest culinary craze needn't require an advanced degree in chemistry or a handy supply of liquid nitrogen, according to the Dublin-based designer Ahmad Fakhry. His beautiful set of tools, called Eating Objects, allows diners to use the techniques of molecular gastronomy to prepare food with untraditional tastes, colors, and textures, challenging, in Fakhry's words, "people's preconceptions toward food and the habits they have grown up with."
The sensuous quality of the utensils -- made of porcelain with copper detailing -- is meant to encourage users to start experimenting with such unfamiliar concepts as "spherification" and "gelling" -- that is, turning foodstuffs into tiny spheres, a la Ferran Adrià, or into airy gels that dissolve on the tongue. To heighten the interactive experience, Fakhry designed a table equipped with recognition technology so that when diners pick up various tools, animations projected onto the table's underside guide the budding food scientists through the making of a dish. Users are "encouraged to interact with each other and their food in new ways," Fakhry tells Co.Design. And if that proves too much of a production, the pieces can always be repurposed as a sake set and incense holders.
