Event description: Experimental, clever, cutting edge and just one laid-back guy from New York City, Wylie Dufresne and restaurant wd~50 have received multiple honours on US lists and in the World's Best 50 Restaurants. Fellow food-techie Brent Savage (Bentley Restaurant and Bar) also fronts the stoves. And Paul Cunningham reports on the New Nordic cuisine that's put his adopted city of Copenhagen (and his restaurant, The Paul) at the forefront of global trends.

Cooking: Wylie Dufresne, Brent Savage

Talking: Paul Cunningham, Jean-pierre Gabriel

Blogging: Anna blogs at morselsandmusings.blogspot.com

Nature and technology. Many people believe they are competing forces, but at the World Chef Showcase’s Contemporary Creative strand on Saturday, I learnt that some international chefs believe nature and technology are complementary in the kitchen.

Molecular gastronomy has been a fascination of mine since it came to my attention in the early 2000s.

The creations are unachievable for amateur cooks, something you can only experience at restaurants through professionals primarily due to the complexity of technique and the expense of the ingredients and equipment.

Being a fan of this biochemical art form, I was pretty excited to attend the World Chef Showcase, part of the Crave Sydney International Food Festival, to see New York’s WD-50 head chef and owner, Wylie Dufresne.

Dufresne is articulate and confident talking to the crowd. He explained that the chemicals, powders and techniques he applies to his food are a vehicle to trigger memories through flavour. This all became clear when he talked through a video of WD-50’s eggs benedict.

Dufresne took something so familiar - a simple breakfast of poached egg on an English muffin with hollandaise sauce and ham - then turned it upside down, figuratively speaking. There was fudgy egg, bacon shards and a deep-fried breaded-cube that oozed rich Hollandaise when cut.

It didn’t look like a typical brunch dish, but it certainly tasted like it.

This session got me thinking. Although the ingredients don’t look like themselves when they foam or wobble on your plate, in some ways they taste more like themselves because these chemicals and techniques enhance the pure flavours, dismissing the need for additional ingredients that would water down the intensity.

It’s a pretty obvious concept, yet one that hadn’t occurred to me until today.

I was enthralled and entertained by a passionate conversation between international food writer Jean-Pierre Gabriel and Paul Cunningham, chef of Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred The Paul, as they philosophised further.

Cunningham explained that kitchen technologies allow him to remain locally focused yet extend his menu possibilities in the Nordic climate where extreme seasons limit produce availability. He can present simple ingredients in a complex ways but still focus on pure, natural flavours.

Gabriel sees chefs as opinion leaders and the 'new Nordic' cuisine (think Noma) as a manifesto for accessing nature through technology. With so many people concerned about chemicals added to food in the name of molecular gastronomy, I thought this was an interesting take on recent shifts in modern food.

Similarly Brent Savage, from Sydney’s Bentley Restaurant & Bar, touted the use of foraged ingredients like wild borage flowers and samphire. For products he sources further afield, he takes an active interest in their production, like Tasmanian mussels from Spring Bay, farmed deep-sea.

We were lucky enough to try Savage’s sous vide bacalao, mussels and smoked potato mousse thickened with xanthan and dispensed through a cream charger. The popular contemporary cooking method sous vide (vacuum-sealed bags in a low temperature water bath over a long time) significantly intensifies the ingredients flavours. Our tasting sample revealed velvety mousse only lightly smoky and still clearly tasting of potato contrasting perfectly with the salty-sweet seafood.

Savage’s dish further demonstrated how scientific cooking can enhance the inherent qualities of the food and doesn’t need to compete with its natural aspects. Dufresne summarised: “I have a lot of powders, but I don’t have something that makes bad food taste good.”