For Rob Mifsud, it started innocently enough.
The Toronto computer programmer wanted to wow his wife on Valentine's Day, and the recipe he found for white chocolate and caviar sounded effortless as well as decadent. "It took me three seconds to make the dish. It was great," he says.
Encouraged by that success last year, Mr. Mifsud soon got into the harder stuff: like sodium alginate and calcium chloride, which he used to create his proudest culinary achievement yet, "liquid pea ravioli." These spoon-sized spheres of gooey green "filling" - where the outside pasta casing is implied but not actually present - he discovered in the El Bulli restaurant cookbook.
Today he thinks nothing of dipping into his pharmacy-like pantry for a scoop of lecithin to impress dinner guests with a frozen chocolate "air" -- a block of gourmet-grade dark chocolate that's been whipped up with bubbles to resemble an Aero candy bar.
Mr. Mifsud, 33, is part of a small but growing band of intrepid home cooks experimenting with molecular gastronomy, the surrealistic cuisine pioneered by Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and now brandished at cutting-edge restaurants the world over.
"This is food that has a wow factor," Mr. Mifsud says.
Controversial for its use of industrial chemicals and sensational for its unorthodox flavour combinations and trompe l'oeil presentations, the culinary movement is transforming home kitchens into makeshift science labs.
In a technique that could be described as "Look, ma, no oven," Clement Lo, a 28-year-old engineering graduate and marketing specialist with a courier company in Toronto, recently "baked" a chocolate soufflé with the help of his fridge. "It was pretty neat," he says.
Mr. Lo first made a simple mousse, then stirred in some Knox brand gelatin powder and scooped the mixture into the bottom half of a ramekin, which he placed inside a FoodSaver-style vacuum chamber resembling a salad spinner.
"It's basically one of those containers where you can store your lettuce and you suck all the air out and your lettuce remains fresh," he says.
With the air pumped out and the internal pressure decreased, the mousse expanded like rising dough. To prevent it from falling, he placed the whole chamber in the fridge, hardening the gelatin. "It will stabilize and so you'll have a sort of cold soufflé."
Mr. Lo says he got the inspiration from the writings of Heston Blumenthal, chef of London's famed The Fat Duck and one of the leading apostles of the molecular movement.
That list also includes French physical chemist Hervé This and Chicago chefs Hamaro Cantu and Grant Achatz of "sci-fi" dining temples Moto and Alinea, respectively.
Like Mr. Adrià, whose El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona has inspired several cookbooks and a gruelling public-speaking schedule, Mr. Blumenthal has taken to popularizing molecular gastronomy's techniques, mainly through columns in London newspapers. Both men recently participated in a molecular gastronomy convention in Barcelona that enabled home cooks to listen in over the Internet.
Adding more recent impetus to the home invasion is the emergence of online sources for the chemicals and contraptions behind molecular gastronomy's greatest hits. Most notably, El Bulli has launched the Texturas line of powders that can turn such items as potatoes and oysters into foams, and liquids such as mango juice into caviar-like globules. Also recently entering the fray are U.S. distributors LEpicerie.com, Terraspice.com and Willpowder.net, which have launched their own branded lines of similar ingredients, including xanthan gum, an emulsifier, and agar, a gelling agent, which are also commonly available in health food stores.
"We have had orders from hundreds of end-users," says Will Goldfarb of Willpowder.net in New York and a former apprentice to Mr. Adrià at El Bulli. Mr. Goldfarb's products range from $6 (U.S.) to $15 for a supply that would last most home chefs many years (a fraction of Texturas' prices).
