An Italian chef will bring his brand of so-called 'molecular cooking' to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva on Tuesday when he prepares a special lunch for guests at the official inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Ettore Bocchia will lead 36 cooks to provide the 1,500 guests with an impressive 20-course meal based on molecular cuisine, a discipline that embraces scientific principles in the creation of recipes.
''We are in full swing and the kitchen has changed look, with lots of test tubes, ovens and microwaves and a corner in which we've set up a computer,'' said Boccia, who usually works as head chef at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni di Bellagio, near Como.
Among the dishes on the menu will be guinea fowl eggs cooked at 65 degrees, following a molecular cuisine rule that it is the temperature at which an egg is cooked, rather than the time it spends cooking, that produces the best results.
A new invention to be tasted by guests for the first time on Tuesday is a Bearnaise sauce made without butter, which is instead replaced by the plant fibre inulin.
Ten puddings also feature on the menu, including raspberry, vanilla and chocolate ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.
Bocchia first introduced molecular cooking to Italy in 2002 and has written a recipe book with Parma University physicist Davide Cassi.
The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world and is designed to allow physicists to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang.
