How does note-by-note cooking differ from cooking with traditional ingredients?

Note-by-note cooking differs from traditional culinary practices by replacing conventional ingredients—such as plants and animals—with pure chemical compounds.1

While traditional cooking relies on complex biological materials, note-by-note cooking utilizes individual substances like water, ethanol, and glucose to construct dishes. This approach, introduced by Hervé This in the mid-1990s, is conceptually analogous to synthetic music, where individual "notes" or components are combined to create a final composition rather than relying on the pre-existing structures found in nature.1

It is important to clarify that "molecular gastronomy" itself is the scientific discipline investigating the physical and chemical transformations during cooking, not the act of cooking itself. Note-by-note cooking is a specific culinary trend that emerged from the broader interest in the science behind food, moving beyond the use of traditional ingredients to a focus on pure compounds.21