WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-07-30 Time: 09:00:02 Posted By: News Poster
By Katy Chance
Johannesburg – NEVER before has a food combination tasted so good: a spoon of blue cheese and a chunk of dark chocolate. It was delicious; and now I know why.
Prof Peter Barham is a polymer physics specialist at the UK’s University of Bristol. He visits SA twice a year to oversee his research programmes on the endangered African penguin on Robben Island.
But it’s his third hat, that of the only (honorary) professor of molecular gastronomy in the world, that interests me.
In Joburg he was at Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown as part of its Meet the Scientist programme, offering his trademark animated lectures such as Get Science Licked: The Physics of Ice Cream; and The Science of Taste and Flavour.
If you’re looking for a definition of molecular gastronomy, though, don’t ask Barham. He doesn’t like the term very much, but it’s stuck.
Back in the late 1980s, a group of scientists, chefs and food writers got together with the idea of collaborating about issues of food science.
It didn’t fly with many. Why were physicists talking about cooking? It’s not physics, it’s just playing with food. But as Barham notes, science and its study owes its existence to the need to cook and eat. Chemistry and alchemy had its origins in observations such as an egg transmogrifying from a liquid to a solid, but not back again, when heated. “It’s an irreversible transition,” says Barham. “Actually, now we can reverse it, it’s quite a trick – but you wouldn’t want to eat it!”
At the forefront of the meetings around food science was then professor emeritus of physics at Oxford, Nicholas Kurti. Most chefs at the time were dismissive of food science, but Kurti believed it a legitimate area of study as his famous line shows: “We know the temperature of the atmosphere on Venus, but we don’t know the temperature inside a souffle as it cooks,” which was true at the time.
Through various meetings of minds and personalities, among them physicists, chemists, psychologists and even a dentist, about 30 people met in Erice, a village in Sicily with monasteries converted to science conference centres, which are still in use.
“The meeting had to have a name,” says Barham, who authored The Science of Cooking in 2001. “People like to label things, and it was called the International Workshop on Physical and Chemical Aspects of Gastronomy, which is quite a mouthful.”
The workshops continued every few years and, for the sake of brevity if not clarity, became known as the International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy.
In about 1999, Barham was contacted by a “manic young chef”, the now famous and famously perfectionist Heston Blumenthal, who features locally on BBC Lifestyle.
The two have become great friends and collaborators. “Heston was the first chef to pursue the science in the kitchen. He attended the Erice workshop with me in 2000 and was instantly captivated by the possibilities.”
While “the crystallisation of very long molecules … and how they rearrange themselves when a molten polymer is solidified” still excites Barham – “and about 10 other people” – it was a Genoese sponge that launched his gastronomic career.
Always interested in good food, he needed a hobby after completing his first doctorate and his wife bought him a cookery book. He started with a cake: he saw the fabulous picture, amassed the ingredients, and followed the instructions: “It looked nothing like the picture, so I said forget that, I want to understand the science. I looked at the end product again, and the ingredients, and worked out the science for getting one from the other.”
He learnt to make cakes well, too well. Not only baking for his own birthday, he ended up baking for colleagues’ birthdays too and it got a bit much; so he taught them a lesson.
“I created a seminar called Structurally Reinforced Foams From Natural Materials, in other words – how to bake a Black Forest gateau.” It was so popular it became a public lecture and fed into a new respect for gastronomic study.
While food science may be a more correct term than molecular gastronomy, food science is often associated with bulk food, commercial production and food processing and gets a lot of bad press, “not much of it justified”.
So the University of Copenhagen created a food science department and, after much haggling, Barham agreed to head it part time with small research groups – including a chef – to try to understand the science of taste and flavour.
At his interactive lecture of the same name, he explained that taste lies with the tongue, but offers no flavour; to identify that subtlety you need aroma, as any wine taster worth their salt will tell you. The nose has about 500 sensors compared with the five of the tongue.
We’re programmed, like all mammals, to seek out the five tastes of salt, sweet, sour, acid and bitter, and umami, which dates back to our days as hunter gatherers, and we all taste things differently.
There is more of the much maligned but essential monosodium glutamate in a good Italian meal – or a cheese and tomato sandwich – than in Chinese food. Our sense of smell monitors rate of change in aroma, which is why a degustation menu of many varied flavours is more gastronomically interesting than a huge plate of a single flavour. Colour and texture play a part too: serve your food on white crockery rather than on a blue Willow pattern, and your cooking will be deemed far better. Or, as happened at the lecture, put red food colouring in a sauvignon blanc and people are still likely to taste “red berries” in it.
Modern salt does not ensure vegetables stay green when boiling and Gorgonzola smells different going out of the nose than in. It’s all great fun although some chefs may not think so. “Traditionally, a stock for a sauce base would be boiled then cooled, then skimmed of solids then reduced – it could take a week. I’ll cook it in a pressure cooker, then shove it through a top-end filter and it takes 20 minutes. The result is the same.”
Barham’s recipe for ice cream is to combine milk, cream and icing sugar, add liquid nitrogen and serve. Anathema to many chefs, it’s the kind of recipe Blumenthal loves.
“In the UK there is a new British cuisine emerging that surprises, delights and amuses,” says Barham. “If you eat at Heston’s restaurant, The Fat Duck, you’re unable to eat without laughing at some point. The joke’s in the food.”
Barham’s work is not science for science’s sake; it’s about understanding the science behind what makes some food delicious, and why some foods work together. The meal is the motivation behind the study.
Analysing the chemical compounds in food affords a simple theory: if two foods share molecules it’s highly likely they’ll go well together. If they have none in common, they won’t. Chocolate and chilli have four compounds in common, as the Aztecs could have told you if they knew how.
In a televised experiment a few years ago, 10 ingredients were analysed by a mass spectrometer. Two had identical chemical profiles. No mistake had been made so Barham and his colleagues assumed the two would go perfectly together: they turned out to be blue cheese and chocolate.
On the screen we watched Blumenthal create a chocolate coulant with blue cheese as a pivotal ingredient, because the scientific proof is often in the pudding, and it’s always right.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 30 July 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201007300642.html?viewall=1