By CAROLINE SHIN

The Holiday Turkey Project from caroline shin on Vimeo.

A love for food can certainly inspire culinary creations. But it’s the creators who sprinkle in a dash of their personal style to their food.

By tailoring their love to who they are, food-lovers find interesting and sometimes untraditional ways of using food. Their concoctions can hinge on anything from technology — a la chef technologist Dave Arnold — to art — from painter Will Cotton — to, well, food for the sake of food — via home chef Jeffrey Babb.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Arnold rushed the six blocks — in his characteristic mile-a-minute manner — from the French Culinary Institute in SoHo to DiPalo’s in Little Italy to get his hands on eight pounds of “the best lamb sausages.” He would be making his Scotch eggs, sausage-wrapped eggs, his special way: Some minutes in the immersion circulator and a couple of drops of nitrogen oxide.

After catching a whiff of Arnold’s scientific methodology, Salvador DiPalo, 51, a fourth-generation worker at the famed mom-and-pop shop, went off on a mini-tirade. “Why do you take the love out of the food?” “Food science,” he spat out. “It sounds nonromantic.”

“You’re breaking my balls over here,” said Arnold, 38, director of culinary technology at FCI and frequent shopper, with slicked-black hair and a gap-toothed smile.

DiPalo then leaned over and said: “I’ll tell you the truth, Dave’s one of those people who has the most love for food. He wants to take it a step further, create a new dish, a new love. Dave wants to try it all.”

The perfectionist scientist, Arnold has had an innate technological bent — borne from the days his father would leave electrical engineering equipment lying around their house in the Upper West Side and his doctor mother would throw special dinner parties. He has matched his scientific curiosity to his passion for food.

“I’ve been into food my whole life,” he said. “I love all food.”

During his Yale undergraduate years, he made his own whiskey sours and a hot tub that ran on shower water. Arnold’s wife and college sweetheart, Jennifer Carpenter, 37, recalled his crazy “whiskey sour hot tub parties,” and said “they were really fun.”

He built the first circulators for low-temperature cooking at Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, infused gin and vermouth into a cucumber for an edible martini, and purchased a 500,000-BTU torch for some idea that will pop up. As it usually does.

At Columbia University School of the Arts, he gained some notoriety and appeared in the New York Times in 1997 for an art project in which he killed a frog to mechanize a robot with its muscles — a “Frankenstein” that predated his most recent project, a Thanksgiving “Franken-turkey.”

For Thanksgiving, Arnold prepared a deboned turkey stuffed with an aluminum skeleton and cooked from the inside out at low temperatures. He wanted to produce “the perfect turkey” that would be evenly cooked and juicy. He had discovered, after a series of experiments, that different parts of poultry have different cooking temperatures and times. This was the basis for his “Franken-turkey,” which lay wired and strapped up outside his office-laboratory to eye-popping stares and second glances.

Carpenter said: “It was the best turkey I have ever had. It was perfectly moist and tender throughout.”

The attention to scientific cooking — better known as “molecular gastronomy” by the public, to the cringing of insiders, since all cooking involves molecular changes — has been on the rise for the past couple of decades. In 1984, Harold McGee published “On Food and Cooking,” in which he gave scientific answers to practical questions. And in the 1990s, a number of young prominent chefs — triple Michelin award winners Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in Spain and Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in England — began to apply McGee’s scientific approach in the kitchen, according to The Economist.

Recently, the National Restaurant Association released the hottest trends for 2010, from a survey of 1,800 professional chefs. It seems that science is here to stay. In the category of food preparation methods, liquid nitrogen for freezing and chilling and sous vide, or “boil-in-a-bag” cooking, ranked at the top. The scientific knowledge may extend even beyond the restaurant and into the home kitchen, with the launch of the Sous Vide Supreme, which costs $449.

Food has also been crossing paths with art as well. On the last three Sundays of November, food artist Will Cotton held his pop-up shop of baked goods at Partners & Spade, a quirky bookstore and gallery space in SoHo. From the doorway, a massive painting — easily mistaken for a photograph — of a voluptuous nude woman immersed in luxurious pink cotton candy clouds, was clearly visible. Those who entered passed a pogo stick and a motorcycle and were greeted with the smell of a certain sweetness of baking. Finally, there was Cotton, fair-haired and reserved, overseeing the frosting on the burner. It was sweetness all around.

Cotton said that Andy Spade, in August, had requested a contribution “not appropriate for a gallery setting.” He thought, “Baking installation!”

“I got really interested in how smell and taste can complement a visual experience,” he said. For his opening day, he made 600 pastries, including 350 macarons, 20 pear tartlets, 24 chocolate raspberry cakes and three big cakes. He brought macaron flavors including vanilla pink peppercorn and salted caramel.

The Massachusetts native and Cooper Union graduate, Cotton is known for his juxtaposition of nude women and colorful confections. He says he uses sweets as “a metaphor for desire,” and arranges them as landscapes in his paintings, drawings and sculpture. Think Candyland for adults.

“I love candy,” he said quietly, and admitted that his sweet tooth is connected to his art work. “Certainly, that’s a part of it.”

He has painted a woman wearing a pouf of ribbon candy ringlets; drawn a lady with a swirl of an ice cream cone atop her head; and sculpted a five-foot stack of large cakes that tip over onto one other. He has a professional oven in his studio and he bakes nearly all of his confectionery landscapes. He admitted that he goes to the gym twice a week and yoga once a week “to be able to keep eating” his desserts.

For “Cotton Candy Sky,” the oil painting on the gallery’s back wall, Cotton had made batches of pink cotton candy. He posed his model on a pink bed sheet, and looked to the actual cotton candy for the details in his painting.

Misha Votruba, 44, came in with his wife and children, who were so curious about all the different treats and earnestly looked at each one—at least those that were up to their eye-level. For others that were placed a bit higher, Votruba picked them up, and the whole family ordered their sweets of choice. Votruba bit into the carrot cupcake. “It is out of this world,” he said.

Depictions of food in art have been around for centuries: from the paintings of lavish banquets by Willem Kalf during the Renaissance to portrayals of fruits by Paul Cezanne in the late 1800s to the famous Campbell’s soup cans by pop artist Andy Warhol in the 60s. The blog EatMeDaily.com, presents a fascinating array of current contributions to food art. It features Mike Geno’s bacon Christmas tree postcards, Jennifer Rubell’s edible donut installation and Timothy Thompson’s aluminum cupcakes.

In a much more private setting, Jeffrey Babb, 29, media relations associate at Macy’s, cooks for himself five nights a week. Cooking, for him, is  relaxation. “It’s the equivalent of some people’s five-mile run,” he said. “I just make it part of my day.”

His forte is barbecue, which he learned from his father, a seven-time winner at his county barbecue championship in Texas. His father had also won some awards at the Houston Livestock Show and the Rodeo Cook-off, one of the largest in the state. And he takes tips from wherever he can get them: Food Network, Web sites, friends.

From Dave Chang of Momofuku fame, Babb learned smoke water—the end product of smoking water along with meat to pick up the flavor without actually touching meat. “Smoke water is the new fried chicken,” He said. He also smokes Coca-Cola for a whiskey drink called the Waylon.

A few months ago, he was hit with a homemade bacon craving. He went to Chinatown, bought pork belly, seasoned and cured it for seven days, and cooked it. “Turned out to be the next-level bacon,” he said.