Can't wait for Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to come out? Want to channel your inner Marcel and annoy your dinner guests with foams? If you've always known you can do better than Wylie Dufresne and Ferran Adrià, Think Geek–those purveyors of things you never knew you needed, such as Tauntaan sleeping bags and Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutters–has the starter kit for you.
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Though the product has been out since last year, according to Wired Magazine, the online shopping site only recently started peddling it.
Simply called Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit, the $70 set includes a DVD, tools, and “sachets of thickeners, emulsifiers and binders that, when mixed with your ingredients and shaped using the included tools, can make extruded spaghetti-like strands of arugula, glistening pearls of balsamic vinegar, or stratified towers of jellies, cremes and foams.”
It's geeky, all right. But when you know how to do the tricks, magic is no longer magical. How long will it take before we'll all look back and consider this kind of food as silly as parachute pants?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.