Category molecular gastronomy

Practical molecular gastronomy, part 5

5. Learn how to control taste and flavor. When invited over to friends for dinner, even before eating, you judge the food by it’s aroma, handing out compliments such as “It really smells nice”! Thankfully, nature is on the cook’s…

The Experimental Cuisine Collective

The Scientist in an interview with Hervé This reports that: Recently, New York University Assistant Professor of Chemistry Kent Kirshenbaum teamed up with chef Will Goldfarb to bring experts together to discuss the intersection of science, cooking and eating. Often…

Podcasts on popular food science

The New York Academy of Sciences has an interesting series on the Science of Food. On April 10th Hervé This, a pioneer of molecular gastronomy, talked about “Dinner: The Final Frontier”. An interview with This and the other speakers is…

TGRWT #1: Garlic, coffe and chocolate

Reading the comments on how to prepare a dish using garlic, coffee and chocolate, I figured it could actually be a good idea to make this into a food blogging event. Inspired by Is My Blog Burning (IMBB), Sugar High…

Searching for flavour pairings

Google can be of great help when exploring flavour pairings, especially for those of us who don’t have access to the commercial database VCF. The following tip has been mentioned in a comment to a previous blog post, but I…

Triple flavour pairing: garlic, coffee and chocolate

Preparing for a presentation on flavour pairing, Bernard Lahousse at Food for design visited Franí§ois Benzi at Firmenich, a large supplier of aroma chemicals and perfume ingredients. Bernard plans to launch a website dedicated to flavour pairing soon, and in…

Chew more and taste more!

Were you told by your mom to chew each mouthful 20 or 32 times before swallowing? Her rationale was perhaps to prevent you from choking. But it turns out there is a link between chewing (or mastication) and release of…

Apples and ultra sound

Heston Blumenthal has investigated how sound affects chewing, but I didn’t know that sound was so important for how we perceive the taste of apples. Studying particularily crisp apples, named Jazz apples, researchers found the following: Professor Povey said, “When…