The kitchen laboratory

Molecular gastronomy in action: strawberry ravioli on a spoon before being dropped into a liquid nitrogen bath. Credit: iStockphoto/Thomas_EyeDesign

These days the kitchen is my chemistry lab, and if I were back in college I’d probably be one of the students beating down the door to get in to a cooking science class like this one at Harvard.

Despite my experience with chemical gadgets, the wildest item in my kitchen is a food processor. Watching what molecular gastronomy folks cook up next soothes my strange secret longing for a rotary evaporator and a supply of liquid nitrogen. So last month, I headed over to the Experimental Cuisine Collective meeting to find out about a chemical kitchen topic, flavor pairings.

Bernard Larousse started with a fascinating side note about the partnerships that he and his colleagues are building between chefs and scientists with the Flemish Primitives. Chefs used ultrasound to make stock, but my favorite funky food gadget had to be the fluidic plate (my term, not his). Researchers developed plates that work like microfluidic chips (see earlier post), electrical circuits within the plates allow chefs to deliver water droplets to the food at a defined point in time. Sure, this isn’t really practical at home (Yes, I want one). But this plate has the right mix of posh and geeky food style.

But back to the flavor chemistry. Eighty percent of taste comes from the sense of smell, as most of us notice when we have a cold and all food tastes like cardboard. But what makes two flavors work together? Researchers have analyzed the flavor components and compared them. A good match is all about having a similar mixture of component flavor compounds. This doesn’t take into account other issues such as texture. If you have two foods where the flavors don’t overlap, you can bridge between them with a food with flavor components that overlap between the other two: cheese and vanilla don’t match, but they work fine if you add coffee.

The website maps these chemical relationships on a wheel. Like foods are grouped together on branches, and the distance from the central food indicates how well it matches. Take this one for strawberries: I don’t think I every would have matched them with mussels. Not only can you make new matches, you can also figure out how to replace a flavor with other components with related flavor profiles.

That last piece seems to be particularly useful for vegetarian foodies, who’d like to replicate the robust flavor of meat. Larousse also points out that it can be a way for locavores to replace non-local ingredients. Replacing an ingredient like citrus with other natural ingredients still seems a bit more like a science project at this point– something that molecular gastronomers might try for fun. Ultimately, it’s probably easier for most of us to go buy an orange.