It should come as no surprise that food, chemistry and mathematics meet in baking. For once I will leave the chemistry aside for a while and turn to the mathematical aspects of baking. More precisely I will delve into geometrical problems encountered in baking. When cutting cookies from a rolled out dough or placing cookies on a sheet for baking you actually attempt to solve a mathematical problem known as a packing problem. The purpose is to maximize the distance between the cookies and maximize the size of the cookies, paying attention that the cookies should not touch. Many will perhaps start with a square packing (see below), but soon figure out that a hexagonal packing will fit even more cookies onto the rolled out dough or onto the baking sheet (especially when the dough/sheet is large compared to the cookies). The optimum way of placing 2-17 circles in a square are shown below (and the solution for up to 10.000 circles is also available).

My challenge for you however is a different one as I’m interested in eliminating the leftover dough when cutting cookies. To achieve this the cookies cannot be circular. Using a square cookie cutter (or simply a knife) would be the easiest way to leave no gaps, but how cool are square cookies? What I’m really looking for are cookie tessallations which are aesthetically pleasing, and at the same time transferable to a baking sheet. Oh yeah: a tessallation “is the process of creating a two-dimensional plane using the repetition of a geometric shape with no overlaps and no gap” according to Wikipedia. So – no gaps – no leftover cookie dough!

Should you ever want to place circular cookies on a square baking sheet, this is how to maximize the size of the cookies! (Illustrations CC-BY-SA by Toby Hudson)

This is one way of solving the problem with leftover dough shown in the top picture. A tree can quite easily be transformed into a shape that fills the plane without any gaps. This image was made using the Tess software mentioned below.

Tessellations are frequently encountered in the art of M. C. Escher, and his Regular Division of the Plane Drawings are all based on tessellations. Most of Escher’s drawings however are not useful for making cookies because they are too interlocking – it would be impossible to take the cookies apart and transfer them to the baking sheet (and baking them “interlocked” would not be an option as cookie dough inevitably will raise/expand a little, making everything stick together). But I did find one example of an Escher inspired cookie cutter as well as some other nice examples of cookie cutters especially designed to make tessellations:

Over at Thingiverse the design file for this Escher inspired cookie cutter can be downloaded (Photo by Bas Pijls via Thingiverse). And should you want to transfer your own designs into a 3D printable format, check out this cookie-cutter-generator.

From Cox & Cox you can buy this Jigsaw cookie cutter (Photo from Cox & Cox product page). If you have access to a 3D printer you can also print your own jigsaw cookie cutter.

These elaborate cookie cutters are designed by Keith Kritselis. Over at Kickstarter you can find more information about his special cookie cutters for Halloween and Christmas. What makes them special is that each tessellation is made up of three or four different shapes.

If you rather want to make your own tessellations there are a couple of different software and online apps available, but I’ve found Tess to be one of the best. An evaluation copy of Tess (no save function) can be downloaded for free. Below are a couple of designs I’ve made. The patterns are nice, but would I want to each cookies with these shapes?

And finally the challenge for you all: Make your own cookie tessallations and share it! It’s not a competition, but rather an invitation to contribute. If the design is great I might have it 3D printed on a friends MakerBot or order it in metal from Shapeways and blog about it here If you send me a picture (preferably at least 620 pixels wide/high, email to webmaster/a/khymos.org) I’ll put up a gallery to display the submitted designs.

The book Cooking science – Condensed matter by Adria Vicenc came out last year, but only recently did it appear on my radar. This 75 page preview suggests that it is part coffee table book and part documentation of modern Catalan cuisine combined with short essays on various topics such as food preservation and synaesthetic cooking. Add to that a dash of technology and large photos and descriptions of a sous vide water bath, a rotary evaporator, a freeze drier etc. It’s kind of like a light version of Modernist Cuisine. In his introduction Ferran Adria states that: “As has happened throughout history in the majority of the stages of human evolution, the new technologies act as a support for the progress of cookery”. This is technology with a purpose: better food!

More information in Catalan, Spanish and English is available from the Materia Condensa website. The book features QR codes which lead to various digital resources (also available directly from the website).

The book features a periodic table of preserves (full resolution view available through this preview) which I’ve now added to my list of other food related periodic tables. Fun? Yes! Useful? Probably not…

Readers well aquianted with the food blogosphere will likely be familiar with Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot’s blog Ideas in food. Since December 2004 they have generously shared pictures, ideas, insights and inspirations online. As chefs they have eagerly integrated modernist techniques and elements in their cooking, allowing technology to improve their cooking whenever possible. No wonder I’ve been a long time follower of their blog! And needless to say I was also exicted to receive a review copy of their recent book Ideas in food: Great recipes and why they work.

First and foremost the book is a great collection of ideas explored by the authors. The ideas are exemplified through recipes (about 100 in total) which showcase the creativity of the authors, from the simple vanilla salt to innovative pasta and risotto techniques, red cabbage kimchi with a built in pH indicator, grilled potato ice cream and practical examples of how hydrocolloids can be utilized. It is certainly an engaging book, and my copy is filled with countless comments, “Try this!”, “Interesting!” and enthusiastic exlamations, but also question marks and disagreement. For some reason the book has been divied into Ideas for everyone and Ideas for professionals, the latter dealing mainly with hydrocolloids. But why the discussion of starch and gelation is reserved for the professionals whereas the recipe for homemade mozarella which calls for lipase, citric acid and rennet is placed in the “for everyone” section, eludes me.

I suggest you have a pencil ready when reading the book!

As the title suggests there are not only ideas and recipes, but also exlanations that sometimes dig deep into food science. The real strength of the book are the cases where a deeper understanding of the underlying science leads to new ideas. Having explored potatoes and hydration of starch, a simple yet brilliant idea which comes out of this is the parcooked rice (65 °C for 30 min) which subsequentially allows for a superfast risotto. As elegant is the hydration of dried pasta by soaking in cold water. Once hydrated, the pasta is drained and kept in a closed container/bag in the fridge. When dropped into boiling water the pasta will cook as fast as fresh pasta. Combining this with other ideas led to a mac’n cheese made from roasted pasta that is smoked and then hydrated in milk, reserving the excess milk with the surface starch for later stage to help thicken the sauce.

Pasta hydrates in cold water (1:4 ratio of pasta to water) within a couple of hours. The fully hydrated pasta cooks within a couple of minutes.

Explaining the science of food and cooking in lay terms is difficult, especially when striving for simple and correct explanations. On some occasions the authors strike a good balance here, but at times the explanations are either too simplistic or too detailed to be of any real help. I was often left with a feeling that the text desperately called for illustrations for the reader to properly grasp the concepts, for instance in their discussion of amylopectin, amylose and starch granules. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to science text books, but the fact that Ideas in food doesn’t have a single figure, diagram or photo is a drawback in my opnion.

Understanding how amylose and amylpection would be easier had they included a simple drawing like this one.

Ever since reading Hervé This’ book Révélations gastronomiques (available in German as Kulinarische Geheimnisse, not available in English) I have appreciated the approach that combines recipes with answers to the many whys that pop up in my mind. Comparing Ideas in food: Great recipes and why they work with This’ book, what shines through at places is the author’s lack of scientific training. Without doubt they know much more food science than the average chef, but it is surprising for instance that the Maillard reaction is not mentioned in their discussion of stocks. And the precision of the recipes is often questionable, especially regarding their use of metric units in the first section. Saying that 1/2 cup of milk equals 130 grams makes sense to me because I expect to see a rounded number. But an online conversion calculator I often use says that for milk 0.5 US cups = 121.8 g = 118.3 ml, so I would naturally have rounded this to 120 grams. On the other hand, when the authors state that 8 3/4 cups of water equals 1968.75 grams the precision implied by the number of digits will make for a good laugh for scientists reading this. And I’m puzzled by how the “cups” used apparantly range from 225 to 260 mL – is there something I’m missing here?. The ultimate solution to this of course would be to eliminate the United States customary units alltogether (sorry all Americans!). Ironically this is exactly what the authors did in the “Ideas for professionals” section.

In the light of the recent paper on the 6X °C egg the whole chapter on “perfect” eggs seems a little outdated. The recipes are probably fine (I haven’t tested them), but I was surprised to read that egg whites coagulate from 60-65.5 °C (this must be a typo) whereas egg yolks coagulate from 65-70 °C (true, but they start to coagulate at a lower temperature, and it’s a function of time and temperature).

To conclude, the compilation of great food ideas is what I found most rewarding in the book. And despite the shortcomings mentioned above I would wholeheartedly recommend the book, simply because of all the nice examples of how a new technique or theoretical insight can be extrapolated into related areas and lead to new ideas in the kitchen. I suggest that you get Ideas in food: Great recipes and why they work for it’s collection of ideas and the creativity of the chefs. But if you’re interested in the whys of cooking you will be better served by other books, the obvious choices being On food and cooking and Keys to good cooking by Harold McGee or The science of cooking by Peter Barham.

Ideas in food – Great recipes and why they work
Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot
320 p, no illustrations/photos
2010, Clarkson Potter
ISBN 978-0-307-71740-5

The Canadian sommerlier François Chartier (he has an extensive website featuring several blogs, including a section named Sommellerie moléculaire) is out with a new book on food and wine pairing. It’s not just another (superfluous) book on the subject. As the title Papilles et molécules (= Tastebuds and Molecules, unfortunately not available in English) suggests there is some science involved. It turns out in fact that he has applied the principles of flavor pairing to food and wine. With help from Richard Béliveau from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Martin Loignon from PerkinElmer he has analyzed wines and food and comes up with the following suggestions for lamb, as described in the article “Chemistry-set wine pairing”:

Having roast lamb? Don’t waste it on an ill-advised red Bordeaux, the old standby trotted out by generations of sommeliers. Lamb’s characteristic flavour comes from thymol, an aromatic compound found in the oil of, yes, thyme. It’s also a flavour note associated with red wines from the southern Languedoc region of France, such as Minervois, Corbières or St. Chinian.

Other combinations mentioned in the article include:

rosemary – white wines from northern Alsace
pork – oaked red wines
curries – viognier
cinnamon – pinot noir, grenache, ice cider, oloroso sherry

François Chartier also introduces “bridge ingredients”. Mint, which goes well with sauvignon blanc, shares aroma compounds with parsley, fennel and tarragon. Based on this he theorizes that sauvignon blanc should also pair well with dishes based on these ingredients.

As far as I can see (with my very limited high school French) there are no links or references to all the other activities in the field: Heston Blumenthal’s pioneering of the concept together with François Benzi from Firmenich, the Food pairing website – not even to the TGRWT food blogging event Nevertheless it’s nice to see that the concept has now been applied to food and wine as well. As I don’t own the book yet I can’t tell whether François Chartier includes odor activity values in his discussion or not (but I certainly hope he does!).

Update: The book is now available in English as Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food With Wine.

I just discovered that The Atlantic features a blog by Grant Achatz of Alinea. Under the title “Back of the house” we get a peek “Inside the restlessly creative mind and kitchen of Grant Achatz” according to The Atlantic. Grant has so far reported from the Madrid Fusion in January (four posts) and in the latest post he describes how a visit to Japan has inspired him to explore manipulation of the environment at Alinea. Comments are allowed and Grant is actively involved in the discussions. Recommended reading!

The International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (IJGFS) is planned for launch this year. Elsevir is mentioned as a publisher, but there is currently no further information on the Elsevir website. The journal is initiated by AZTI-tecnalia, a Spanish technology center specializing in marine and food research, in collaboration with ALICIA, a Catalan research centre focusing on technological innovation in kitchen science and the dissemination of agronourishment and gastronomic heritage. The restaurant Mugaritz and the websites aliment@tec and Ciencia y gastronomia also have their logos on the IJGFS website. The objective of the journal is to “fill the gap in the expanding fields of Gastronomy and Food Science, by adopting a scientific approach”.

In addition to scientific papers and review articles they plan to publish “original recipes” which is novel and unusual for a scientific journal. I must say that I’m curious about how the peer review process of “original recipe” contributions will be. How do you judge novelty and originality of a recipe? For scientific work this is easier as there are comprehensive databases of previously published work. No such database exists for recipes. Nevertheless, it is a goal for the journal to become a communication channel betwen chefs and food scientists, and we’ll probably see recipe contributions from both groups. If the concept of the journal works out and they actually manage to get contributions from chefs and scientists (and hopefully also some joint contributions) the journal will become a quite unique addition to the more food science oriented journals!

From the descriptions it seems that the journal will cover scientific, technological and practical aspects of molecular gastronomy, even though they completely avoid using the molecular gastronomy! Instead they list the following areas of interest: Gastronomy in perspective, Food Science and Gastronomy and Innovation in Gastronomy. Regardless of which labels they use, this all sounds very interesting to me!

An invitation to contribute has been sent out by email and in case you didn’t receive one but would like to contribute I’d recommend you to check out the online invitation and fill out the application form. I’ll return with an update once the journal goes live.

Hervé This has launched a new website: Travaux de Hervé This. As with his two blogs it’s difficult to follow unless you speak French. But at the same time it’s hard to get around Hervé since he’s a pioneer in the field! Machine translation of the French websites is available from Babelfish and Google, but the translations still leave a lot to be desired.

I recently stumbled across an interesting article on risk perception: If It’s Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky – Fluency, Familiarity and Risk perception. Researches from the University of Michigan had students read lists of fictious words and imagining that they were reading food lables and judge the hazard of each ingredient form very safe to very harmful. The words were divided in groups of easy-to-pronounce words (such as Magnalroxate) and difficult-to-pronounce words (i.e. Hnegripitrom). If I were to take the test I’d probably rank Magnalroxate as worse than Hnegripitrom – the “roxate” somehow reminds me of a pesticide or something like that. It turned out however (as expected) that substances with difficult-to-pronounce names were perceived as more harmful than substances with easy-to-pronounce names.

The result of the study is quite unfortunate, and chemists face a communication challenge here. When chemists give name to molecules they follow conventions agreed upon by IUPAC for systematic names. This can sometimes lead to extremely long and unpractical names, hence the use of trivial names. To give you an example of this glucose has the systematic name (2R,3R,4S,5R,6R)-6-(hydroxymethyl)-tetrahydro-2H-pyran-2,3,4,5-tetraol. If one where to judge by difficulty of pronounciation consuming this one should be pretty risky. On the other hand the compound known under the trivial name mustard gas could sound like a volatile cousin of Dijon mustard but is in fact a blistering agent, used in chemical warfare. The take home message is: Don’t judge a molecule by it’s name!

Talking about risk perception, the article reminded me of the warnings against the dangerous chemical DHMO, also known as dihydrogen monoxide. To read everything about the risks, visit the DHMO website. To read a little background information about the hoax, start with the wikipedia entry on the dihydrogen monoxide hoax. In case you’re lazy and don’t bother to check the links: dihydrogen monoxide is simply am uncommon scientific name for water. But don’t be lazey, the DHMO website is actually quite amuzing

[Article on risk perception was found via CEN blog]

Bruce Bryan demonstrated a glowing cocktail drink (top left), and tempted us with fluorescent cake frosting (top right). The chocolate surprise boxes included a lollipop (bottom left) and I was quite busy sucking the lollipop, listening to the translation of the Belgian/French/Spanish contributions, taking notes and photographing at the same time (bottom right).

The chocolate surprise box was one of the highlights at The Flemish Primitives that I’ve blogged about three times already. As I promised you in the last post I’d come back to the lollipop that was included in the box. Between chocolates number 2 and 3 Bruce Bryan entered the stage. The lights went off, we were instructed to suck intensely on the lollipos and then – when I took the lollipop out of my mouth it was glowing! I was sitting in the front row, but as I turned around I saw a fully packed auditorium of people sticking out their glowing tongues and holding a glowing lollipop in their hands. The only sound you could hear was a whispering choir of “wows”. That was quite amazing!

Bruce Bryan is a medical doctor by profession but he now spends most of his time trying to secure funding for his inventions related to bioluminescence. His primary invention is related to the use of green fluorescent proteins in combination with luciferin/luciferases as tumor markers by combining them with appropriate antibodies. I’m not able to explain the details, but you can find more information on Bruce’s homepage. The take home message is that it for instance can improve cancer surgery by litterarily being a “guiding light” for the surgeon.

Bioluminescence is emission of light by living organisms. Glow worms (which include Fire flies) and dinoflagellates are among the best known. Most dinoflagellates are marine plankton and they glow when the water is disturbed, for instance by waves crushing onto the shore or by the propeller of an outboard motor. Sitting in a small motorized boat, crusing through water that is glowing is truly amazing – I got to experience this some years ago! And the chemistry behind is also fascinating – I’ve included a little about that at the end of the post.

A lollipop submerged in a glass with hot water which makes it glow even brighter (yet still requiring 8 seconds of exposure time!).

I had a quick chat with Bruce Bryan in the break following his presentation and he was so kind to give me two lollipops to take home. Of the glowing kind, yes. That’s how I got the pictures in this post. He suggested that I hold a lollipop under hot running water and then spray the water clinging to the lollipop on a wall in a dark bathroom. – You’ll see the universe open up in front of you, Bruce told me enthusiastically. I tried it and you can see a picture below.

Unfortunately it has been hard to find funding for further development and FDA approval of the isolated luciferin/luciferase complexes of use in food. In fact, during his presentation Bruce showed us a slide with the following text:

(…) These “colorants” are not FDA approved and may not be by the patent expiration (10 years) if some broader shoulders don’t get involved. Optimistic estimates are 2 1/2 years and $5 million dollars to get these products approved. (…) we’ve cloned six genes, spent a lot on collection, have put our life savings and mortgages into making rapid chip based diagnostic and cancer imaging applications possible! Tragically we have not had ANY corporate interest.

Considering this it might be true what he jokingly said about the lollipops perhaps being the most expensive candy ever made Even ideas such as “Bud light” or “Pepsi light” (yes, that kind of light) were turned down by the respective companies. The only products to appear so far are various toy items which are available online through Biotoy. Bruce has also set up the companies Prolume, Biolume and Nanolight to further develop and market the technology. His own homepage also has some info and the full text of the patents is easily found with a google search.

The lollipops (top left) I got from Bruce were of a different kind than those in the chocolate surprise box. A nice “stars of the universe” effect was achieved by dipping the lollipop in water and spraying the bathroom wall (top right). The bottom pictures shows my glowing tongue and the lollipop (sorry for the blurry picture – exposure time is 1 second at ISO 1600).

The chemistry behind the glowing lollipops is fascinating. What is required is a luciferin and luciferase. These are not specific compounds but rather generic terms. Luciferin is a compound which acts as a substrate for the reaction that generates light (see list of luciferins) and luciferase is an enzyme which catalyzes the reaction. One of the most common luciferins is coentelerazine (shown in the figure below). In the presence of a suitable luciferase and oxygen it is oxidized to coenteleramide. The important thing here is that coenteleramide exists in an excited (energy rich) state. To get rid of the excess energy it emits a photon which we see as light. In the process the substrate (or fuel if you like) is used up and must be provided continously for constant light production. The enzyme luciferase is unchanged by the reaction and can be reused. Further information on coelenterazine chemistry and bioluminescence can be found in the book “Bioluminescence” by Osamu Shimomura who was awarded the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry (together with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien) for the discovery of green fluorescent protein.

In the presence of a luciferase and oxygen coentelerazine is oxidized to coenteleramide in an excited state. As coenteleramide reverts back to it’s ground state it emits light. The part of the coentelerazine molecule where the changes occur is indicated with blue color. The cartoon representation of luciferase is taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Update:
Bruce Bryan generously sent me a pack of different glowing candies and lollipops with different tastes and colors. IMO this surely has a market potential!

The label of the green and white lollipops reads: “Ingredients: Sucrose, corn Syrup, Tapioca & Chicory root starch, salt, natural and artificial flavors, 5 mg Renilla Luciferase protein and less than 0.2 mg Coelenterazine a naturally occurring anti-oxidant found in many fish”

English = Norwegian
beef brisket = oksebryst
sirloin = mørbrad
bottom round = rundbiff
round steak = flatbiff
chuck = høyrygg
roast beef = roastbiff
club steak = entrecotè
tenderloin = indrefilet
T-bone = T-ben
boneless strip = ytrefilet
ground beef = kjøttdeig
short ribs = bibringe
flank steak = slagside
stew meat = bankekjøtt

There are a couple of false friends here. The Norwegian translation of “round steak” literarily means “flat steak”, whereas the Norwegian “Rundbiff” which litterarily mens round beef is equivalent to the English “bottom round”. Easy to get confused here…