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Peanut-butter-and-jelly gets reconfigured by Marcel Vigneron in Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. (Evans Vestal Ward/Syfy)

Foam-crazed chemist-cooks have become increasingly obsessed over the past few years with transforming basic foodstuffs into abstract sculptures.

Prime-time TV taps the trend Tuesday with Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen, a new show that stars the kitchen and lab exploits of chef Marcel Vigneron, the talented but snarky perfectionist known to fans of reality series Top Chef.

Here’s how Vigneron reworks the classic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in Quantum Kitchen: For the grape “jelly,” he adds 10 grams of glucose and 3 grams of xanthan gum to 600 grams of grape juice, then stores the mixture in a refrigerator for 24 hours. He spoons the resulting gel into spheres that are dipped in a sodium alginate bath for 10 seconds, followed by a cold water submersion.

To complement the grape spheres, Vigneron adds 2 ounces of tapioca maltodextrin to a scoop of peanut butter, producing a powdery consistency.

Quantum Kitchen follows Vigneron and his crew as they cater high-profile Hollywood events, with the scientist-chef trying to rein in the expletives en route to producing visually outlandish taste treats. Vigneron, 30, predictably delivers elegantly constructed dishes in the third act of each episode, but the real drama comes from the messy trial-and-error that leads to eureka moments.

In Episode 1 of Quantum Kitchen, for example, Vigneron inflates thin sheets of cheese into delicate spheres that will be injected with tomato foam. The balloons look great for a few seconds, then explode into a goopy soup. Vigneron bleeping forgot that the warm foam would melt the cheese encasement.

Elsewhere, racing the clock to come up with a wildlife-themed centerpiece for their client, Vigneron’s right-hand man Jarrid Masse comes to the rescue by figuring out that fried pork rind cracklings look an awful lot like snake skin.

Quantum Kitchen owes its fondness for deconstruction–reconstruction techniques and unorthodox ingredients like nitrous oxide and liquid nitrogen to experiments conducted by Ferran Adria in his Spanish restaurant El Bulli beginning in 1987.

The father of molecular gastronomy, Adria turns his kitchen into a laboratory for six months each year and breaks down ingredients into their constituent elements in order to build new dishes from the ground up.

High-end kitchen-cum-laboratories like Wiley Dufresne’s wd-50 have been fixtures in New York City and elsewhere for years, and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has created a 2,400-page cookbook called Modernist Cuisine.

But the new Syfy series marks an uptick in mainstream media coverage. Documentary films El Bulli: Cooking in Progress and A Matter of Taste both premiered last week at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival.

The scientific techniques flaunted in Quantum Kitchen and elsewhere appear at times to be driven by the notion that food should be transformed because it can be transformed. Vigneron serves schoolkids freeze-dried crumble that a few minutes earlier functioned perfectly well as slices of a fresh orange.

Still, Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen captivates with flashes of genuine creativity grounded in precision craftsmanship. The end result may or may not taste great, but the process itself can be a beautiful thing to behold.

Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen debuts Tuesday at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Syfy.

WIRED Goopy misfires create suspense as artist-scientist-chef creates intriguing transformations of everyday foodstuffs.

TIRED Standard-issue reality show structure fails to match food-prep innovations.

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