There are a couple of recent academic papers that have been published the last 2 years which I haven’t mentioned in blog posts, but they really deserve attention. Here’s the list (with quotes from the abstracts): Molecular gastronomy: a food…
Pure mono sodium glutamate from Taiwan A recent article (found via Harold McGee’s News for curious cooks) featuring Heston Blumenthal as a co-author emphasizes the huge difference in glutamic acid contents between the flesh and pulp of tomatoes. Glutamic acid…
Among dedicated whisky/whiskey drinkers it is customary to add a little water as this “helps to unlock and release the esters, or flavours, from the fats”. Another site claims that dilution helps “breaking down the ester chains and freeing the…
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…
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…
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…
About.com has a nice guide on how to color eggs, and the list of colors is quite impressive (click for instructions): Lavender Small Quantity of Purple Grape Juice Violet Blossoms plus 2 tsp Lemon Juice Violet Blue Violet BlossomsSmall Quantity…
(Photo by vintage_patrisha at flickr.com) 4. Learn how to control the texture of food Taste and flavour normally get more attention when food is discussed, but the texture of food is equally important and our tongue is very sensitive, not…
A group of Japanese researchers (J. Agri. Food Chem. 2007, 231) has recently shown that the ranking of Japanese green tea can be predicted by careful analysis of several compounds. In the resulting model used for the predictions it turned…
Some years ago, a group of researches studied the formation of lightstruck flavor in beer (Chem. Eur. J. 2001, 4554). They found that isohumulones, compounds contributing to the bitter taste of beer, decomposed when exposed to ultraviolet light. In a…
