Home Cooks, Meet Molecular Gastronomy

Bless-this-mess chefs looking to make something more exotic than green-bean casserole this holiday season are in luck. Fall brings a trio of cookbooks from world-renowned molecular gastronomists whose kitchens look a bit like chemistry labs, with all those centrifuges and tanks of liquid nitrogen used to make carrot foam and whiskey jellies. This hyper-whimsical style of cooking has caught on at many a celebrated restaurant, but are these books--whose recipes call for ingredients like calcium lactate--even remotely useful for home cooks?

"Absolutely!" says Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea Restaurant. "There's a huge misconception that the food here will be science-y. It's food." He concedes that there "are tons of steps" in his Alinea (Ten Speed Press; $50), but, he says, "a well-written recipe is as simple as a fourth-grade story." And since not all fourth-graders have an antigriddle (a cooktop that freezes rather than heats), Achatz notes that a cookie sheet atop dry ice will suffice.

Another molecular tome, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (Bloomsbury USA; $250), includes recipes like nitro-scrambled egg-and-bacon ice cream that are probably out of reach for amateurs. But, says author Heston Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, got three stars from Michelin, "we still have lots of little bits and techniques people can pull out and use at home," like poaching potatoes before frying for crisper chips. Blumenthal, by the way, is not fond of the term molecular gastronomy, which he thinks sounds élitist. "Everything in cooking is chemical," he says. "Water is a chemical. Salt is a chemical."

For the millions of foodies who can't get a reservation for one of Ferran Adrià's 30-course tasting menus in Roses, Spain, there is A Day at elBulli (Phaidon; $50). The most useful thing about a book like Adrià's (wildest recipe: preserved tuna-oil air) might be a glimpse into the future. Techniques that start in restaurants often make their way into the home. Says Tim Ryan, president of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.: "In the '50s and '60s, microwaves were very cutting edge."

One molecular technique poised to hit home kitchens is sous vide, in which meat is vacuum-sealed and poached at a very low temperature, producing supermoist and flavorful dishes. In December, Thomas Keller, who has two three-star restaurants, will publish Under Pressure (Artisan; $75), which offers sous vide recipes just as a slew of home sous vide equipment hits store shelves. The future is almost here. Start making counter space for the antigriddle.