As I mentioned in part 1 of the travel report from Brugge, the highlight (for me at least) of The Flemish Primitives seminar was the surprise box presented to us by Dominique Persoone (owner of The Chocolate Line) and his team which included James Petrie (pastry chef at The Fat Duck), Tony Conigliaro (mixologist, bartender at Roka, blogger) and Bruce Bryan (medical doctor and inventor). As the box was distributed in the auditorium (more than 1000 present, mostly chefs) the instructions were kept very simple: DO NOT OPEN THE BOX! Makes you wonder of course what is inside.

Once all the boxes had been distributed (and expectations had risen to even higher levels) Dominique was ready to give further instructions. Too make a long story short – to acompany each piece of chocolate there was a short video, music/sounds and a smell! For each piece of chocolate the text “EAT NOW!” let us know when to taste the chocolate. I won’t even try to describe how the different elements tasted – and the reason for this is simply that I was so taken by the totality that I stopped noticing details about the separate element. It was really cool and it took me by surprise! But I’ll give you a list of the chocolates and the picture/sound/smell pairings, just to give you a brief idea of the concept.

Dominique Persoone let us know exactly when to eat the chocolate!

1) Breast formed chocolate with pipette containing sweet, white liquid. Picture/video of breast, a baby beeing breast fed and sound of crying baby. Smell of baby filled the room. Verdict: Surprising element when nipple came loose – it was quite chewey!

2) Chocolate on field of grass – the chocolate was in fact flavored with grass extract! Video of a gras lawn being mowed, hot summer day, buzzing insects. The auditorium was filled with the smell of freshly mowed grass – together with the smell of freshly baked bread most people rank this as one of their favorite smells. I asked Bernard Lahousse about the smell and he confirmed that this was a single compound smell which basically means that they used cis-3-hexenal. Verdict: My favorite!

In between chocolate 2 and 3 we had the glowing lollipops – I’ll come back to that in a later post, promise! I have to research the chemistry behind that first

Chocolates are numbered clockwise, starting at top left.

3) Chocolate with crisp crumbles and small chocolate fish oysterganache and crumbled smoked sea-eel. Video of ocean waves. Smell of sea and ocean was spread with large fans on the stage together with a fog producer to get a nice fog effect. Verdict: Ocean smell was quite overpowering

4) A chocolate filled with a watery gel. Video starting with a warm, dusty dessert followed by thunder lightning and ending in a thunder storm with heavy rains. An ocean perfume was distributed by means of balloons that were dropped. Participants who captured a balloon were instructed to puncture the balloon in order to liberate the perfume. Verdict: Watery gel had a very pleasant cooling effect, contrasting the chocolate.

Liver cappuccino served in chocolate cups

Following the chocolate tastings Tony Conigliaro demonstrated a cocktail with “raindrops on leaves” which included a ganache of green tea. There were no tasting samples of this one – and it was too far away for pictures, but Tony had also participated in preparing a coffee based drink that we got to taste in one of the breaks (I’m a bit uncertain about who else participated on this one). A whipped cream prepared with goose liver was combined with coffee and chocolate. When pouring the coffee, the goose liver cream floated up, creating a “liver cappucino”. It tasted nice actually! Only faint hints of the foie gras, but yes – it showed that coffee has more than meets the eye.

Tony mentioned to me that he’s blogging too over at Drink factory. Do check it out!

Long time readers of this blog might remember that I’ve mentioned the aroma jockey Erich Berghammer before. Performing under the artist name Odo7, he blows scents over his audience with huge fans and has stocked up a pantry with exotic spices, roots, leafs, oils, extracts and herbs. The smells are vaporized using hot water. In the post I asked why Odo7 hadn’t been invited to a restaurant yet – I dare say we came quite close during this “chocolate surprise” session. But without doubt, for the next year’s event it would be really cool invite Odo7 for a performance. And if you allow me another wish – since it all took place in a concert hall where acoustics are good and there is a large stage – how about combining Odo7 with taste samples, modern ballet and some really groovy music? With such a combo one would truly approach a Gesamtkunstwerk – a term originally coined by Richard Wagner. At that time in encompassed music, theater and visual arts. I think it’s about time to expand that and include all the senses!

You might now think that this would fit very well in a movie theater, and yes – some thought about that already Smell-o-vision has been a reality for a loooong time. In fact you have to go all the way back to 1916 when rose scent was distributed with the help of an electric fan during a newsreel about the Rose Bowl game. And the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote about multi-modal (=several senses) eating in his “Futurist cookbook” which was published in 1932. Sub sole nihil novi est!

My question for you is: Have you ever tried this? What smell or perfume would you like to serve with your food?

6. Learn how our senses work

Prolonged exposure to a flavor causes adaption and habituation, meaning that your brain thinks the food smells less even though it’s still present in the same amount. Back in 1953 Lloyd M. Beidler isolated nerves from the tongue of rats to study these phenomena. The nerves were situated in a flow-chamber through which aquous solutions with salty, sweet, acidic and bitter compounds could be flushed. The electric signal produced by the nerve was then recorded and fed to an amplifier and a plotter. Very simplified, the perceived intensity of the stimulus looked something like this (the curve is not to scale in any dimension and it’s my own qualitative interpretation of the data presented in the article):

After a short initial latency period a transient is followed by a slower prolonged decrement. There is even some nerve activity after the stimulus has been removed. What is interesting from a molecular gastronomy perspective is that the initial burst of taste quickly fades away – some call it fatigue or adaption. If the same stimulus is applied repeatedly, the maximum intensity of the initial taste burst decreases for each time it is applied. This is known as habituation and is illustrated in the figure below. As the time between stimulation of the receptor increases, the receptor recovers from the habituation and the intensity of the second stimulus increases to match the intensity of the first.

Adaption and habituation are also observed with odor. If you have used eau de cologne or perfume you might have noticed that you can smell it very well once applied, but after some minutes or hours you hardly notice it unless you sniff intentionally for it. The same applies for food.

Variation is the spice of life, and variation helps our senses to overcome adaption and habituation. More technically this has been referred to as “increased sensing by contrast amplification” which I think is a good way putting it. An illustrative example is Heston Blumenthal’s potato purée with small pieces of lime jelly (made with agar agar which is heat stable once it has set). The idea was that to avoid the adaption to the flavour and texture of the potatoe purée, small pieces of lime jelly would help “reset” the taste buds and thereby lead to an increased overall perception of the purée. I’m personally very fond of the variation provided by multiple component dishes. A curry sauce for instance is normally not served alone but alongside many other dishes: rice, dal, chicken/meat/fish, chutney, raita, nan, chapati, pakora, lime juice, salt etc. The different components contrast each other and help bring out the most of the meal.

Contrasts also help us smell better. When we sniff there is an abrupt change in the amount of air passing through our nose. More molecules pass the receptors and the sudden change in their concentration makes it easier to sense them. It has been shown that sniffing in fact gives an optimal odor perception.

Our senses are not unrelated, and there are many interesting articles illustrating this. For instance, adding color to make white wine darker or even red influences the perception of the wine aroma. Along the same lines, consider crystal pepsi which wasn’t a great success after all, probably due to the lack of color. With juice and soups it has been demonstrated that odors smelled through the mouth are perceived differently than those smelled through the nose. Similarily colors can either enhance of suppress the intensity of odors depending on whether they are smelled through the nose or through the mouth.

There are a number of odor-taste interactions. For example, through repeated pairing with sugar, odors become “sweeter”. We become better at detecting sugar solutions if strawberry aroma is added to them, but worse if ham aroma is added. And you shouldn’t be to surprised that both perceived and imagined odors influence taste (that’s right – think of strawberries, and sucrose will taste sweeter!). Heston Blumenthal uses this in the savory ice creams he makes. We associate the cold and rich mouthfeel of ice cream with something sweet, and this influences our perception of the flavour, making it sweeter. In general, the “sweeter” an odor is perceived, the more it enhances tasted sweetness and the more it suppresses sourness. Preliminary experiments suggest that even pure tastants have a smell.

A thing to consider when eating is that our body position influences olfactory sensitivity. And don’t forget that your emotional state also has an effect on the olfactory perception. Emotionally labile people are more sensitive to certain smells and less sensitive to others.

The examples of how our senses are not independant has some practical implications for cooking and eating:

Presentation is paramount, and it is worthwile to consider the art of food presentation. There is a lot to learn from food photography blogs and food blogs with good photos: still life with…, matt bites, 101 cookbooks, la tartine gourmande too mention but a few. Also check out the pictures submitted to the monthly food photography blogging event does my blog look good in this (google DMBLGiT to find out which blog hosts this month’s event).

Taste, smell, texture, mouth feel, temperature and appearance will all contribute to the overall experience when eating and drinking. But also the room, the atmosphere and the people present have an influence. I have previously mentioned the five aspects meal model which has been developed for restaurant settings and takes all of this into account.

Many of the ideas found in this blog post can be expressed in appetizers. With small, well prepared amuses bouche there is variation with every bite, creating excitement and anticipation.

And remember that average food eaten in the company of good friends while you’re sitting on a terrace with the sun setting in the ocean will taste superior to excellent food served on plastic plates and eaten alone in a room with mess all over the place.

Update: I submitted the picture of the cherries in the heading to the monthly “Does my blog look good in this” (or DMBLGIT for short) photo competition for food blogs – and guess what – the picture was the winner of the August 2007 round. This is a great honour, because there are so many good photographers out there with food blogs. Click to view the complete gallery of the August 2007 round.

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Check out my previous blogpost for an overview of the 10 tips for practical molecular gastronomy series. The collection of books (favorite, molecular gastronomy, aroma/taste, reference/technique, food chemistry, presentation/photography) and links (webresources, people/chefs/blogs, institutions, articles, audio/video) at khymos.org might also be of interest.

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 you munch a Jazz apple you create pulses of sound containing large amounts of ultrasound which our brains interpret differently from ordinary sounds such as speech. The pulses are so intense that if they were sustained as a tone, they would destroy our hearing.”

“It appears that ordinary hearing is short-circuited somehow and the greater the number of pulses of sound, the crisper we think the food is. Ultrasound is sound that is beyond the range of normal human hearing but it helps shape the noise into pulses that sound quite different.

“Our group of subjects were culturally diverse but all were able to identify crispness similarly. So perhaps there is a genetic disposition to the appreciation of crispness which has evolved as a sign of freshness in food.”