Chris, thank you for letting always inspiring more ask you a few questions on a very intriguing topic. You are a trained mathematician and biochemist who has turned to molecular cooking. What drove your decision?
While at university, I came across an interesting book called On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, and it captivated me. Often, when I should have been focused on my academic work, I was instead reading my copy of McGee. It made me realize how much I didn’t know about cooking. So I got to work filling gaps in my knowledge, cooking my way through classic books on technique such as Jacque Pépin’s La Technique and La Methode. But it was Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook that kept me toiling away into the night perfecting my brunoise, skimming stocks, trussing chickens, braising short ribs, and thinking about becoming a professional chef.

And that is exactly what you did – a complete about-face it would seem...
In the autumn of 2001 I came to the self-realization that spending several more years pursuing a doctoral degree was not in my future. A reasonable question, then, was what should I do? With degrees in biochemistry and mathematics there was every reason to believe I was employable. The problem was, however, that I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided to get a job as a cook. Besides, I desperately needed to subsidize my hobby with a job. My grocery bill was getting out of hand! I hesitated only slightly before quitting academic pursuits for a job in a kitchen.

Both your passions – science and food – suggest that you’ve been into them for some time now. What fascinates you about the two?
I have always been fascinated by cooking, even as a child. To me a kitchen was a place to have fun. Later, as a scientist, the lab was also a place for fun and creativity.To me, science and culinary arts are both ways of exploring ideas, and new ideas are the currency of both scientists and artists. The confusion comes because people who have avoided science, or only experienced it in the boring environment of the classroom associate science with facts and structure, whereas they associate art with creativity and whimsy; but actually you need to be very creative as a scientist.
One of the joys I get from my work is applying both the scientist and chef aspects of my personality. At face value it might seem like these methods of thought are at odds, but really they combine to be the catalyst for doing innovative work in the kitchen. Fundamentally, I believe all chefs are scientists at some level. Anyone preparing a dish is conducting an experiment.

Although many of our readers may have heard of molecular cuisine, the idea of what it is is probably quite vague. Could you put in a nutshell what distinguishes it from the way of cooking we usually practice at home?
For most cooks and chefs, the way we cook is by learning recipes and mastering their techniques. This is the craft of cooking. This is an excellent way to cook if you want to prepare great traditional dishes like, say, cassoulet or pasta carbonara. But cooking this way does not lead to innovation.
For me, great cooking should challenge your assumptions and engage all of the senses—taste and smell, sight and touch, but also sound—to create rich culinary expenses that evoke profound emotions. And this is what I think is truly cool about modernist cuisine: it explicitly embraces this goal, and uses science and technology to enable these kinds of dishes.  For me, modernist cuisine isn’t about a particular style of cooking so much as it’s an approach to cooking where you try to leverage an understanding of the how’s and why’s of cooking to do something new and innovative with your food that will be compelling to eat.

Your way of cooking is rather new and requires a lot of inspiration as well as technical skills. What are your preferred techniques and ingredients?
First things first, you absolutely should have a good digital thermometer and scale. The thermometer should be accurate to at least 0.5 °C (just because a thermometer will display a tenth of a degree doesn’t mean that it is that accurate), and the scale should be accurate to at least 0.5g, although 0.1g would be much better (but will obviously cost more). These two tools are as fundamental to me as a knife because they allow me to be consistent—you can have the highest quality ingredients, the best tools, and an abundance of creativity, but without consistency none of this will matter.
Beyond these, I think a pressure cooker is a must. I use them for everything from stocks and sauces, to quickly transforming tough cuts of meats into succulent morsels and to make durable plant foods tender in ways that conventional cooking cannot. A pressure cooker is not only a time saver in the kitchen, but can do delicious things that are simply impossible by other means.

Those are tools that are still relatively common in a “normal” kitchen though...
A high tech tool that I use daily is a laboratory immersion circulator. No other tool gives you such accurate control over temperature; and heat, after all, is truly a fundamental ingredient in the kitchen. Being able to control cooking temperature to a fraction of a degree accurately, sometimes for days, enables creative possibilities that are simply unattainable in other ways.
Perhaps the most unusual piece of equipment that I enjoy working with is a centrifuge. Admittedly these are a bit expensive—they’re sold to price insensitive customers like pharmaceutical companies after all—but no other kitchen tool allows you to separate food as easily as a centrifuge. Moreover, it separates food by density rather than size, which allows you to work with ingredients like never before.

Can you give us a practical example?
For example, we centrifuge pea puree to remove a fraction that we call “pea butter” because it has the texture of warm, soft butter and a remarkable, fresh pea flavor. It’s a blend of the natural polysaccharides, pigments, taste and aroma compounds in the pea gathered together in a way that’s impossible through traditional means.

You turned The Fat Duck in Seattle into an extremely successful restaurant. How did you do that?
I was not the chef or owner at The Fat Duck, that would have been my mentor Heston Blumenthal. Working with Heston I learned what extraordinary things a talented chef could accomplish with his or her cooking when empowered by scientific knowledge.

You strive to create a pleasurable experience that is enjoyed with all the senses, but how do you tie in the very personal individual experiences and memories of your guests? You can’t possibly know all of them and take these into account...
Now, for this dish to have an emotional impact beyond mere deliciousness, it turns out the sounds of the sea can’t be too specific. It has to leave room for the imagination of the person enjoying it. For example, if the soundtrack has fog horns, then for a lot of people the illusion is broken, because that’s not their ideal beach. But if the sounds were generic enough, the dish evoked profound emotions from many people.

In most cases, people know what they like to eat. As your creations very often offer surprising taste experiences, people may feel a bit undecided about what to order. How do you find out what to recommend them to meet their likings?
The people I tend to cook for are looking for novel experiences, so I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about recommending one thing over another. Frankly, the best dishes are, by their very nature, polarizing: some people will love them and others will hate them. That’s okay, because if you try to appeal to everyone all the time you usually end up with something very mediocre and bland. Innovation tends to happen at the extremes.