Here at Khymos I aim to cover things related to food and chemistry, and as I stumbled over a periodic table of cupcakes (with clickable “elements” linked to recipes) I couldn’t resist to dig a little deeper. And look what I found! The periodic table of elements is iconic, but the periodic table has also become an organizing metaphor for all sorts of things, including food. The Internet database of periodic tables holds more periodic tables than you could ever dream of, but it’s not complete – at least not with regards to food. Here are the food related periodic tables that I’ve been able to find. Fun? Yes! Useful? No, not really At the end of the post I’ve also included examples of how the real periodic table of elements can be illustrated in a more or less edible fashion. All images are linked to the page where I found them. Are you aware of other periodic tables of food? Please let me know and I’ll include them in this post.

Available as a poster. HighRes available here.

Available as a poster

In case you wondered, it’s a periodic table of breakfast cereals!


HighRes flash version

Condiments that periodically go bad

Cupcakes – what else! And each “element” is linked to a recipe. Very well made!

Period table of food from Disneyland in Los Angeles (Photo: Martin Lersch). Click for a larger image.

Available as a poster

Available as a poster

Available as a poster

Available as a poster

HighRes version available

Two cropped scans available from Slashfood. Original was published in “Simple Life” fall 2006.

Available as a poster

Available as a poster

The menu at “Miracle of Science Bar & Grill” in Boston is a periodic table painted on the wall. More info at the C&EN blog. Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

The real periodic table of elements represented in food
If you think fitting some kind of food into a periodic table is stretching a little too far, why not make an edible version of the real periodic table? In the process you may even learn the name of some elements

Photo by melpenguin

A nice idea for Halloween?

As the name suggests, the TGIF posts are a little less serious than what I otherwise post here at Khymos. I hope you enjoy it

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!).

I recently found an interesting article on how an electric field can be used for maturation of wine (New Scientist news coverage of the article). Applying a AC field of 600 V/cm for 3 minutes resulted in an accelerated aging of wine and according to the authors of the paper, it made “harsh and pungent raw wine become harmonious and dainty”. They observed changes in concentrations of higher alcohols, aldehydes, esters and free amino acids. But I was quite surprised that they don’t say anthing about astringency and polyphenols (tannins). I’d expect some changes there as well, but alas it’s so much more difficult to measure the polyphenols than the low molecular compounds. A sensory panel identified both positive and negative effects of the electric treatment which helped identify an optimum treatment. Apparently several Chinese wine manufacturers are testing the technology on a pilot scale now. Many people have a romantic impression of how wine is made, but the extensive catalogues of “corrective chemicals” available to the modern wine maker should perhaps make you reconsider the romatic idea of wine making. Even professor Hervé Alexandre at the University of Burgundy has given the technology a thumbs up: “Using an electric field to accelerate ageing is a feasible way to shorten maturation times and improve the quality of young wine”. Who knows – maybe you’ll soon be drinking a wine that has been zapped?

Moving from industrial scale wine upgrading to kitchen scale gadgets: In his latest “curious cook” column Harold McGee writes about different gadgets that supposedly can change the flavor of wines. To the better of course. He mentions the Wine wand which is supposed to speed up aeration of wines. The promotional explanation on the web page sounds quite dubious, take for instance the claim that the wine wand can “accelerate the aerating process of wine by replicating the natural frequencies of air and oxygen, and infusing them into the wine”. Complete nonsense! Harold McGee however mentions that he did several blind tests and found that there were differences. I guess we can’t exclude the possiblity that there could be some kind of reactive surface on these wands. From the pictures there seem to be some small (glass?) beads in a hollow cylinder. I can’t find any information about the surface. Perhaps it’s been activated or coated with a metal? In that case we could have plenty of surface chemistry going on. If it’s only glass however – well – then I’d just leave the wine to mature in it’s glass bottle.

The other object he mentions is the Clef du Vin or wine key which is more interesting from a chemical perspective. The active part consists of a metal disc which (in a preferred embodiment to quote the patent jargon) consists of 95% copper, 3% gold and 2% silver. According to the description in the patent application, the device is capable of an “accelerated and gauged oxidation-reduction of the wine”. Dipping the disc into a glas of wine for one second is supposed to equal one year of cellar aging. Metals can catalyze many reactions, and there are many reactive compounds in wine so I wouldn’t be surprised if something happens. Considering the fact that sulfurous compounds (such as hydrogensulfide for instance) are very potent, and that sulfur has an affinity to several metals such as gold, copper and silver it seems plausible that the metal disc may actually remove some sulfides from the wine by adsorption and in turn influence the flavor. However, in the course of one second only a small fraction of the wine has been in contact with the metal disc, so I can’t really see how this should be sufficient. It would in a way be strange if only desirable reactions are catalyzed (i.e. only undesirable compounds are degraded/removed). Anyhow – I’d really like to see a peer reviewed paper on this. For someone with spare time and access to a GC-MS this should be a nice project

A stainless steel “soap” is believed to remove garlic stains from your fingers

Interestingly there is a totally different product that relies on the same chemistry: the steel soap. It is typically shaped like a standard soap bar and consists of plain normal stainless steel. It’s supposed to remove garlic, onion and fish smell from your fingers. It works by rubbing your hands against it under running water. I have one, but to be honest it’s hard to really say if it works or not – perhaps some have more experience with it? I had a friend of mine analyze my stainless steel soap by XPS and he gave me the following elemental composition for the six most abundant elements: 70.6% iron, 18.5% chromium, 8.2% nickel, 1.4% manganese, 0.7% molybdenum and 0.3% copper. This is more commonly known as 18/8 steel where 18 denotes 18% chromium and 8 denotes 8% nickel and it’s what all your forks and knives and other stainless steel tools are made of (which of course means that just about any stainless steel object you have in the kitchen should serve the purpose to remove odor from your fingers). Of the metals present here molybdenum in particular is used industrially for desulfurization of oil. Based on a paper on hydrodesulfurization I speculate whether the mechanism could be something like this:

A proposed mechanism for desulfurization on the surface of a “steel soap”

A sulfur compound exemplified here with a thiol (R-SH) reacts with the steel soap surface and the S-H bond is cleaved. Then the S-C bond is cleaved homolytically to yield radical species. The alkyl radical abstracts hydrogen from the surface and escapes whereas sulfur remains bound to the surface. The surface could be regenerated by removal of sulfur with hydrogen. All in all the chemistry of a steel soap seems plausible to me, but I’m not sure whether the effect is significant effect when it comes to removing that garlic smell from my fingers.

(Photo borrowed from “my unfair lady” at flickr.com)