Flown in directly from Seattle, Chris Young presented Modernist Cuisine at The Flemish Primitives today. In the picture: presumably the first copy in Europe It’s backordered now (see Nathan’s long posts on this) due to high sales. It actually reached as high as #38 on Amazon’s overall sales rank.  I had 5 minutes to take a look at the books today and I can only say wow! These books mark a new era for everyone interested in a scientific and technological approach to cooking! Immediately the feeling struck me: there is nothing more to blog about now. But Chris reassured me (as he also did in my recent interview with him) that there is plenty more to dig into. Phew. Expect more about The Flemish Primitives 2011 in the coming days.

Michael Bom Frøst addressed complexity in meals based on experiments done at noma

What’s in a meal? – The title of associate professor Michael Bom Frøst‘s presentation at the recent seminar on molecular gastronomy in Copenhagen may seem surprisingly simple, but it turned out that a main topic of his presentation was in fact complexity and how it influences the meal experience. Together with PhD student Line Holler Mielby he conducted experiments in a real restaurant setting and given that the experiment took place in noma‘s chambre séparée and that some of noma’s chefs helped out in the kitchen you can imagine how easy it was to find volunteers. Previous studies have suggested a correlation between complexity and liking following an inverted U-shaped curve, suggesting that there is an optimum amount of complexity for maximum pleasure as shown in the figure below [1]. The main purpose of the experiment was to test this hypothesis. The theory also suggests that due to the exposure effect, diners who often eat “complex” food at high end restaurants would prefer more complexity compared to people who eat high end food less often. To address this question it was made sure that the test group included people with and without experience of high end restaurant food. (more…)

Pia Snitkjær’s thesis on Investigations of meat stock from a molecular gastronomy perspective can be downloaded free of charge. Part I includes an excellent introduction to molecular gastronomy, part II covers meat stocks with and without red wine.

Pia Snitkjær was the first student in the molecular gastronomy project at the University of Copenhagen to complete her studies. She defended her PhD thesis on Investigations of meat stock from a molecular gastronomy perspective in December last year, and this was also the topic of her presentation at the recent seminar on molecular gastronomy at the University of Copenhagen. Meat stock is typically prepared by boiling meat, bones, vegetables, spices and herbs, and after straining the remaining liquid it is reduced in volume by further boiling. The central question in the thesis was how the reduction affects the flavor and texture of the stock. Cookbooks only specify the concentration factor, but not the time needed to achieve this reduction.

If you’re only interested in the conclusion from a gastronomic perspective the take home message was (more…)

Foamy strawberries with coriander (cilantro) from TGRWT #3 turned out to be a delicious combination. Could it possibly be a category 2d predicted aroma similarity?

As mentioned in my previous post about the flavor pairing presentation given by Wender Bredie as part of the Copenhagen seminar on molecular gastronomy I’m really happy that the topic has been brought into the scientific community. At the same time is has also become very clear to me that the term flavor pairing needs some clarification. First of all I have come to realize that the the term flavor pairing is slightly misleadning, and I wonder if aroma similarity perhaps is a more precise term. As I see it, today the term flavor pairing is used in a range of different ways: (more…)

Wender Bredie presented results from experiments designed to test the flavor pairing hypothesis

A topic that I was particularily excited to hear about at the molecular gastronomy seminar in Copenhagen was flavor pairing. Since Heston Blumenthal presented his white chocolate and caviar combination based on amines in 2002 and Francois Benzi of Firmenich the pork liver-jasmine combination based on indole the idea has been further elaborated by Bernard Lahousse and Lieven De Couvreur who launched the foodpairing website and by me in the TGRWT food blogging event. Despite the interest and fascination it is fair to say the flavor pairing is still controversial – see for instance the discussion with in particular Jorge Ruiz. What is clearly lacking in the field is a more stringent scientific approach (as well as someone with time, interest, a sensory panel and the money to finance the activities…). It was therefore great to hear that sensory science professor Wender Bredie together with PhD student Ditte Hartvig actually set out to test the flavor pairing hypothesis formulated as: if major volatiles are shared between two foods it may very well be that they go well together. To achieve this they used a sensory panel to assess the odor of food pairs mixed and unmixed. Bredie proposed that a hyper addition of odor intensities would perhaps be the holy grail of flavor pairing – that is if the intensity of the mixed odors would be more than the sum of the unmixed intensities. Or even better: if there would be a hyper additive effect on pleasantness.  (more…)

Homepage of the molecular gastronomy project at the University of Copenhagen (sorry – only in Danish as far as I know)

The research project Molecular gastronomy – the scientific study of deliciousness and its physical and chemical basis (Danish homepage) funded by The Danish Research Council was started in 2006. Led by prof. Leif Skibsted people from the Food Chemistry (Jens Risbo, Pia Snitkær Nielsen, Louise Mørch Mortensen) as well as the Sensory Science group (Michael Bom Frøst, Wender Bredie, Per Møller, Line Holler Mielby, Ditte Hartvig) at the Department of Food Science at Copenhagen University have been involved. In addition gastronomic entrepeneur Claus Meyer (noma co-founder) and physics professor Peter Barham (Bristol University) have contributed, as well as the chefs Thorsten Vildgaard (noma/Nordic Food Lab) and Bo Frederiksen (Meyers Madhus). Any of the names sound familiar? They should if you’ve read the recent review published in Chemical Reviews: Molecular Gastronomy: A New Emerging Scientific Discipline where several of the people involved in the project contributed as authors. This landmark paper summarizes and lays out research opportunities in molecular gastronomy, the branch of food science that deals with The art and science of choosing, preparing and eating good food to quote Thorvald Pedersens definition – he is a professor emeritus in chemistry that played an important role helping to establish molecular gastronomy as a research field at the University of Copenhagen.

To mark the end of the project a seminar was organized on March 2nd 2011. The program included the following presentations:
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The authors of Modernist Cuisine: Maxime Bilet, Chris Young and Nathan Myhrvold

In 2003 Chris Young had an epiphany of a meal at The Fat Duck outside London, and by the end of the meal he knew he had to work with Heston Blumenthal. Things worked out well and after a stage he was hired to build and lead the experimental kitchen at The Fat Duck. In 2007 he returned to Seattle to work with Nathan Myhrvold who at that time was very active on the eGullet forum sharing his research on the sous vide cooking technique. The project that started off as a book on sous vide eventually grew into Modernist Cuisine with 6 volumes spanning more than 2400 pages. After many delays (one being due to Amazon’s drop test which showed that the casing wasn’t sturdy enough for the books totaling 20 kg) Modernist Cuisine is ready for release in March, and will be presented at The Flemish Primitives event in Oostende, Belgium on March 14. That’s one more reason to visit the event!

Martin Lersch: Congratulations with Modernist Cuisine – it is a truly amazing accomlishment! Will you be present in Oostende?
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I’m quite fond of carbonated water, and last summer I bought a water carbonator so I wouldn’t have to carry all the water home from the shop. The working principle of the carbonater is very simple – a bottle filled with cold tap water is subjected to a pressure of carbon dioxide for a couple of seconds, allowing some of it to dissolved in the water. The result is an instant sparkling water. But even with the carbonation there is something missing. The big difference between my homemade instant carbonated water and bottled mineral water is the mineral content. True, tap water may also contain a number of minerals, but this varies and there are huge regional differences. In Norway most water is very soft (i.e. low in calcium and magnesium) and has a very low mineral content. But tap water rarely has a desirable mix of minerals compared with the really good tasting mineral waters.
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It’s soon time for the third edition of The Flemish Primitives and registration has now opened. The Flemish Primitives wants to challenge Belgian gastronomy and bring together chefs from all over the world to meet and exchange ideas built on innovation. The top name this year is without doubt the chef René Redzepi of Noma, the world’s best restaurant according to Restaurant magazine, but “the Flemish primitives” will be present (a group of Belgian chefs) as well as guests and scientists. And there are a lot of new things going on as well. (more…)

Update: I’ve written up a short post about no-knead bread in Norwegian – Brød uten å kna – to accompany my appearance in the popular science program Schrödingers katt.

I know – since the NY Times article about Jim Lahey in 2006 the no-knead breads have been all over the internet, newspapers and now even appear in numerous books – this is really old news. But the no-knead breads are really tasty as well, so I hope you’ll forgive me! When I give popular science talks about chemistry in the kitchen the one thing I’m always asked about is the no-knead recipe I show, so I thought it was about time to publish a recipe. Surely, everyone can google it – but regrettably many (if not most?) recipes are given in non-metric, volume based units – even Jim Lahey’s original recipe. And for baking this is really a drawback because the density of flour depends so much on how tight you pack it. Oh yeah, and I will also try to explain why and how the no-knead bread works.
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