Free The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens

theoretical physics or music composition?
    Two words kept Joanne from forgetting the kid chef: “molecular gastronomy,” a term sometimes used to describe Greg’s style of cooking. It was no accident that it sounded scientific. The phrase was coined in the early 1990s to jazz up a conference on food science in Sicily.The conference’s host wanted something that sounded weightier than “Science and Gastronomy,” so the “International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy” was born.
    In practice, molecular gastronomy looks a lot like science.Hervé This, one of molecular gastronomy’s chief practitioners, has created charts illustrating when coffee chills depending on when milk is added, spent more than three months researching the texture of eggwhites used in soufflés, used nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze carrot-based soup stocks, and puzzled out how to uncook an egg (he said the key was to add sodium borohydride to detach the protein molecules from one another).
    Such experiments aren’t restricted to the laboratory. The restaurant luminary Pierre Gagnaire regularly incorporates This’s ideas into recipes. Heston Blumenthal, the maestro behind the Fat Duck, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Bray, England, explored the science of cooking on
Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal,
a series of six half-hour programs. Exotic-sounding ingredients and techniques like liquid nitrogen (causes rapid freezing), hydrocolloids (substances that form a gel when mixed with water), and dehydration (removing the water from food) are the tools of chefs as statured as Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, Grant Achatz of Alinea, and Greg’s culinary idol, Ferran Adrià. Molecular gastronomy was all the rage. The chef as scientist was king.
    Greg hated the term. He thought it implied flashy cooking. He preferred to call his cooking modern cuisine. The core idea was to enhance the flavor of the food, not to show off fancy ingredients for their own sake.
    But molecular gastronomy or not, Greg’s method of cooking was, at heart, a science experiment. He used the precision of a chemist to test temperatures, cooking times, and preparation methods, always trying to extract the best of an ingredient’s flavor and texture. Greg wasn’t slaving over equations in the back rooms of academia, but in practice his cooking was just a different expression of the same thing. Joanne decided that Greg Grossman was a prodigy. She wanted the kid in the kitchen, if she could get him.
    Joanne clicked her way through articles on Greg and stumbled upon a story detailing his involvement with Veggie U. Greg had recently been in Ohio—a mere fifteen minutes from Joanne’s house. She had just missed him.
    She called her husband, Jim. He contacted a family friend whoworked at the Chef’s Garden, an organization connected with Veggie U, and got the Grossmans’ contact information. A male voice answered Joanne’s call; she asked if she was speaking with Mr. Grossman. When the caller confirmed, Joanne launched into her pitch.
    There was something a bit uncomfortable about asking parents if she could study their child, but Greg’s father immediately put her at ease. Her work sounded fascinating. He was interested. But about twenty minutes into the call, Joanne realized that the Mr. Grossman she was speaking to wasn’t Greg’s father; it was Greg. A fourteen-year-old with the voice and confidence of an adult.
    Greg tried to reassure Joanne that it was no big deal—he did all kinds of cooking deals without his parents’ knowledge—but Joanne hung up. Her Institutional Review Board, the organization that oversees research ethics, forbade her to talk to a minor about her research without the consent of his guardian.
    Joanne waited until Saturday morning and tried the Grossmans again. This time, Greg’s mother, Terre, answered her call.