McDonald’s collaborates with food scientists to make their french fries crispier. Frito-Lay commissions research into flavor enhancers to ensure “you can’t eat just one.” But fine cooking has always held itself apart from the sterile world of test tubes, lab coats, and verifiable data.

Until now. A new branch of food science called molecular gastronomy has become a growing influence on restaurants, debunking age-old assumptions about cooking and revealing new insights about flavor. Herve This, who coined the term “molecular gastronomy” with Oxford professor Nicholas Kurti, is one of its biggest crusaders. A few years ago, he published “Une Theorie du Gout” (A Theory of Taste) in France, and now he brings his insights to America with his first book in English, “Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor” (Columbia University Press, $29.95).

Forget about trying to extend the shelf-life of ketchup – molecular gastronomists are focused on making souffles taller, hollandaise sauce smoother, and cooked pasta less sticky. Mr. This describes these and other endeavors in “Molecular Gastronomy,” using short but sweet chapters to debunk traditional cooking habits and propose new solutions.

But molecular gastronomy does more than tweak tradition – it often discards it entirely. Inspired by the tradition-free principles of molecular gastronomy, Wylie Dufresne’s successful restaurant WD-50 serves mussel soup with orange powder and steak tartare with bearnaise ice cream. At Per Se, Thomas Keller poaches lobster in butter and cooks meat to perfect tenderness while encased in vacuumsealed pouches at Per Se. And the new midtown restaurant Gilt uses agar-agar and liquid nitrogen in its kitchen.

But what’s intriguing in a restaurant isn’t always tempting as a home-cooked meal. User-friendly food science guides by Alton Brown and Harold McGee are more likely to change how you cook. Mr. This’s book will broaden the way you think about food. You’ll learn why chili-heads lose their sensitivity to spice (the death of sensory fibers in the tongue), how bread behaves like plastic, and why champagne bubbles are more stable in glasses that haven’t been washed with detergent.

Mr. This’s book is just one more example of the culinary revolution going on across the pond. Ferran Adria is making wildly experimental food at his laboratory/restaurant El Bulli, and Heston Blumenthal’s English restaurant, the Fat Duck, recently received its third Michelin star for equally outlandish dishes. France’s National Institute of Agronomic Research has established molecular gastronomy as its own academic discipline.

So why hasn’t the movement taken the food scene by storm here in America? Perhaps we’re still under the sway of the Alice Waters minimalism. Chefs regularly boast of getting the best ingredients and then interfering with them as little as possible. Mr. This addresses the issue head on. “‘Things ought to taste like what they are,’ gastronome Curnonsky used to say. His aphorism has been adopted by those who seek to promote authenticity in cooking, but does it really make sense? Isn’t the role of the cook to transform foods with the purpose of recreating traditional dishes and inventing new ones?”

The new crop of modern restaurants is nothing if not inventive. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to assume that the point of, say, a chocolate-caviar foam is novelty, not flavor. But Mr. This would disagree. Deliciousness is the goal; he merely wants to dispell any traditional cooking techniques and food-pairing assumptions that prevent him from attaining it.

Mr. This is even willing to use ingredients that aren’t, well, food. He asks, “Why not reinforce the green note of olive oil with hexanal, or add I-octen-3-ol to a meat dish to give it the aroma of mushroom…?” And of course, since these flavors are chemical-based, they have few if any calories. The suggestion isn’t as outlandish as one might think. David Burke of New York’s Davidburke & Donatella restaurant just launched a line of “Flavor Sprays” to add savor to bland diet food. There’s something exciting, but vaguely scifi sinister, about all this. Dethroning culinary tradition is a slippery slope, indeed.

But though Mr. This attempts to break free from tradition, he’s still hemmed in by his native culture. He notes in one experiment that “roughness was determined by a comparison with the outer surface of a Granny Smith apple, a banana peel, a ladyfinger, and a Breton Cake; solubility was determined by comparison with a long madeleine, a cooked egg yolk, and a small meringue.” Classic recipes are analyzed throughout the book – but almost all of them are French.

And for a scientist, his book has some careless errors. He asserts that “chocolate gets covered with white after a few days” and that “metallic ions are the source of water impurities.” He justifies his distaste for cookbooks by saying they contain doubtful assertions like “mayonnaise will break if women try to make it while they are menstruating.” What cookbooks is he reading?

But for a look at a trend that is seriously influencing restaurants, Mr. This is the man for you. Then you’ll impress your friends by not batting an eyelash when the bell pepper gas with chicken puck lands on your plate. “Oh,” you’ll observe knowingly. “A gelatinized emulsion.”