Over Christmas I have been reading Luca Turin’s book “The Science of Scent”. This became a real eye-opener for me with regards to my understanding of how the sense of smell works. (BTW, Luca Turin was also featured in Chandler…
This is not exactly breaking news, but I just recently discovered that Robert L. Wolke, a retired chemistry professor and author of “What Einstein told his Cook” (volume one and two), writes a food/science column in the Washington Post entitled…
This must be a true holiday treat: Eat miraculin for Christmas and everything sour will turn sweet! Reading Joseph Mallozzi’s blog post on his visit to Jeff Ramsey’s Tapas Molecular Bar in Tokyo, I became aware of the miracle fruit.…
As a follow up to last weeks statement from Adria, Blumenthal, Keller and McGee (article, my comments) The Guardian have interviewed Heston Blumenthal. He now says that MG creates artifical boundries: “Molecular makes it sound complicated,” he says. “And gastronomy…
Under the heading “The Curious Cook” Harold McGee recently started an occasional column on food and chemistry and everything in between in the New York Times. It’s definitely worth reading as Harold McGee has time and opportunity to really dig…
Lussekatt (Photo by Jonas Bergsten) The day of St. Lucia is celebrated in Scandinavia and some countries in southern Europe on December 13th. In Scandinavia a traditional kind of bun, lussekatt, is normally made and eaten on this day. What…
On Sunday, November 10 2006, in The Guardian, Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Harold McGee shared a statment on the “new cooking” with the readers. They feel “widely misunderstood” and argue that molecular gastronomy is “overemphasized and sensationalized”.…
In a recent Science article (Science 2006, 314 (5803) 1235 (requires subscription, but text has been posted in a newsgroup), Martin Enserink writes about Hervé This and molecular gastronomy. One of his projects is to rid cook books of the…
I’ve mentioned hydrocolloids at several occasions earlier in the blog, and today I found an interesting recipe I would like to share. Put simple, hydrocolloids are compounds that form gels when mixed with water. One particular hydrocolloid is methyl cellulose…
I’m working on a page about wine from the viewpoint of a chemist. So far I’ve included a short introduction to wine from a chemical perspective and also discussed interactions between wine and saliva (including an experiment for you to…
