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Molecular Gastronomy, The Science of Cooking
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Art of Cooking is evolving fast in this 21st century. New food products are being designed with the help of molecular technology, genetic discoveries or space research before arriving in our kitchens. For example, here is a Pravda article which says that NASA is preparing sandwiches which will still be edible after seven years. Companies like Kraft are also using nanotechnology to create food products tailored to users' needs. This is a booming market and, according to Associated Press, dozens of universities in the U.S. are offering degrees in culinology, attracting creative students in their food and science programs."
suggestion.
talk to a Nutritionist and not some chef that has a wacked idea on how things work.
Once a week I have fat with meat, because the chef said that new fat kills old fat.
that alone is the most bizzare thing I have ever heard.
guess what, you either need to reduce your caloric intake or do some of the extreme diets to lose weight.
Atkins works as it thows your body into ketosis, vegan works as you have almost zero fat intake,
simply being active, eating healthy and lowering your calorie intake works the best in the long run.
no matter what a life style change is required. What you do to lose weight you have to live with forever and ever.
a chef knows nothing compared to a dietician and nutritionist.
Please get real advice from someone that can explain it in real terms instead of made up mumbo-jumbo like new fat destroys old fat.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This so-called news from Rolland is nothing new.
In fact, I have a BS and MS in Food Science from Cornell.
http://www.foodsci.cornell.edu/
Nor am I the only one. There are over 40 Food Science programs in the US. This is a non-story.
http://www.ift.org/cms/?pid=1000624
Gawd, more fake food. Don't we get that already from McDonalds, Kraft, Budweiser et al? This junk is not good for you and long-term health effects are only partially known.
I strongly recommend the page-turner _Fast Food Nation_. If you're more hard core, read Marion Nestle's _Food Politics_. Also worthwhile (and sadly funny) is the movie _Super Size Me_.
The opposite of this tech-no-food is the Slow Food movement; seek out the farmers, stores and restaurants that support there ideals.
And fercrissakes, start cooking with real ingredients instead of buying processed transfat salt licks made by chemical plants in New Jersey.
The head chef of the Fat Duck (a British restaurant voted the best in the world this year - jokes about British cuisine now null and void), Heston Blumenthal, is what you might call a 'molecular gastronomist'. By breaking cooking down to the basical levels and using the principles of chemistry to determine good combinations of food one can offer up delights such as bacon 'n' egg ice cream and snail porridge; two of the most famous dishes served at the Fat Duck.
I read a fascinating article on Blumenthal in The Sunday Times a good few months ago, and also learned of another restaurant (the name and location of which escapes me, although I think it was in Spain) which offered up similar food. The menu for this particular restaurant was something like 17 courses and several hundred euros a head. The writer for the ST (who was lucky to beat a three-odd year waiting list) was amazed at the combinations of ingredients and even the consistencies of the dishes that were comepletely unexpected. One particular serving that stuck in my mind was a kind of 'orange froth' that practically disappeared immediately in your mouth but was full of flavour. The journalist detailed how strange it felt eating froth for dinner. The cover of the supplement I was reading featured pictures from a handful of the courses and the presentation was astonishing. There was a square chocolate lollipop (I forget what wacky ingredient was coupled with it) which was so thin in the middle it was all wispy and translucent and webbed. Delicious.
Anyone for baconated grapefruit?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Abandon the idea that baby food is somehow necessary for adult health (let alone the baby food of another species). That solves the price of milk problem.
.tracts of land, but have nothing to do with producing enough tomatoes for yourself, by yourself.
Start growing your own "Heritage" food. See the book "Sailing the Farm" for how this can be done on even a small sailboat, a living space far smaller and disadvantaged than even a metropolitan studio apartment. There are tons of newer books on container gardening.
If you've got even as little as 16 square feet of dirt, see the book "Square Foot Gardening."
You might well be surprised at how much you can produce from how little, all without using any of the modern industrial farming techniques.
It's a matter of scale. The modern industrial approach to farming may be needed to generate the largest profit (not food, profit) from huuuuuuge. .
KFG
Nice troll. America is home to some of the best restaurants in the world. Sure, most of the culinary styles here are not unique -- but then again, most of our population is not indigenous.
I'll agree that a subset of the population doesn't have "developed" culinary tastes. The same is true for France, for Italy, for anywhere. Just because YOUR experience of American cuisine doesn't meet your standards, doesn't mean that others' experiences are not different.
I, for one, have a plethora of cuisines to choose from within walking distance of both my office and my house. From Azerbijani to Thai, from crappy to great, it's available -- and I take advantage of it often.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Pravda article which says that NASA is preparing sandwiches which will still be edible after seven years.
Yeah, right. Pravda is about as reliable a news source as the Onion. It's funnier, too.
If it's in Pravda, you can rest assured the story is either an outright fake, or at best innacurate.
> You give humanity more food, you get more humans.
You didn't pay very close attention in sex ed class, did you?
But seriously, you are wrong anyhow. It's easily observed and well-established that well-fed people have fewer offspring than hungry ones.
Dude, Firegal does the BioNet website, I think she knows about that.
And what you're claiming to be well-fed people versus hungry ones is an observation that is impacted by:
1. education of women/girls in well-fed families is higher than in hungry families - the highest statistical correlation between family size is education of girls/women - more education leads to smaller family size - due to many factors;
2. well-fed people have extra resources for proper sanitation (less disease), proper medical care (less disease), and other resources - whereas hungry people not only don't, they also are at increased risk (if children) from catching communicable/infectious disesases and dying off at a higher rate. So the social structure/family adapts by having more kids, since fewer will tend to survive. Part of why recent immigrant families tend to have larger family sizes - it was a survival characteristic.
3. oh, forget it, that's enough for now.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Such as acting as transport mechanism for Vitamins A, D and E, which are fat soluble. You have to have some fats and oils in your diet daily, unless you don't care about proper nutrition.
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So, buy non-hydrogenated margarine. They are usually made from plant oils without the hydrogenation and so result in a softer consistency, and is healthier than hydrogenated margarine or butter.
With the exception of hydrogenated fats which are dangerous because they are (a) trans and (b) saturated, all edible oils are natural. Canola, peanut, corn... yup, natural.
Unless there's a big trend in the food industry that I'm not aware of to use mineral oil.
This statement is completely, flat-out wrong. There aren't all that many chemicals that cause cancer. There are even less in food. Trans and saturated fats causing heart disease? Yeah, sure. Cancer? Not so much.
And don't even get me started with using the word "chemicals" as a scary bugaboo word to mean "evil substance that doesn't have a natural origin and is therefore dangerous."
Totally wrong. Have you been reading "The Population Bomb" again? The food-value-per-arable-acre capacity of the planet is sufficient to support a population many times the size of our own. Most of the arable land in the world is not presently cultivated, and most of that which is produces relatively low food-value-per-acre crops.
Food production capacity is not a problem. The only reason food is even an issue anywhere in the world is because transportation is expensive. Growing food is easy, but getting it to places that are suffering from famine is tricky.
Where did you find this article? Was it between the monkey boy bites man and pyramid power articles or the ones which describe perpetual motion machines from space aliens?
Really, quoting Pravda is worse than treating the National Enquirer as a legitmate news source.
The current headlines at http://english.pravda.ru/ includes this:
Brazil, Russia, India and China to outdo Europe and the US - 08/29/2005 13:29
The main economic analysts of today share their thoughts of tomorrow
The world is changing so quickly that the human mind is unable to keep up. Experts from Deutsche Bank and other analysts decided to take a look at the future. The role of the EU becomes less and less important while developing countries boost their economic growth. Experts do not consider the USA a motive power in the economic progress. China and other rapidly developing countries are more important in the accelerating of world economy.
Uh..ok, the situation is changing so fast that the human mind can't comprehend but Deutsche Bank "experts" can predict the future. Uh...right. No contradiciton here, just accept what Pravda says.
Never mind that they are raising funds by selling Pravda-branded merchandise through Cafe Express...an American commercial site.
Click on the "Science and Health" sub-category and you will see 3 main areas: Discoveries (which includes a story titled, "Ageing and dying is just a freak" about nanotech to let people live forever because science fiction authors think about it, UFOs, and Technologies. That 3rd category includes articles about how every living creature on earth will be given a unique barcode, indispensable Russian Navy submersibles (if only they would learn the difference between nets and hammocks) and the story about food which will last forever.
Yeah, Pravda, the science reference for those without grounding in reality.
Have you ever heard of carcinogens?
Of course I have, there's no need to be snippy.
How about Acrylamide? What is Acrylamide? It is just a chemical that food manufacturors put in French Fries and Chips.
Actually, that's incorrect. Acrylamide is not added to food by manufacturers. While the exact mechanism of its formation is not fully understood, it seems to form naturally when starchy foods are cooked at high temperatures. McDonald's does not have a 55-gallon drum of acrylamide that they add to the french fries.
Furthermore, whether or not acrylamide is definetely a carcinogen has not been fully determined. It, however, has been massively over-hyped in the press. And more recent studies have suggested that a diet high in acrylamide-containing foods does not lead to cancer.
Do you remember sacchrinne? It was used in diet soda, then they discovered it caused cancer.
Actually, it looks like the studies done back in the 1970s which led to the scare about saccharin weren't well-done. They used ridiculously high doses of saccharin, and the high doses may have caused cancer rather than the substance itself. There has been no link between saccharin and caner in humans. Saccharin hasn't been required to be labeled in the US since 2000.
There are thousands of more chemicals which will kill a person than a person can eat.
Of course. There are probably hundreds of carcinogenic substances. There are thousands of toxic substances. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of chemicals. The number of toxins and carcinogens that exist has no relevance to the relative risk from them.
And of course many of them will kill you if you eat them. They're not food! Salt will probably kill you if you eat an entire bucket of it. So will ethanol or aspirin. Toxins are not carcinogens.
I don't want to trust a chemist to tell me eating something that he made in test tubes is good for me
Believe it or not, there is no vast conspiracy of scientists to poision our food supply. We have been performing chemical modification of food since the discovery of fire and the beginning of cooking. The whole point of cooking food is to make the proteins and starches more digestible and so our bodies can absorb its nutrients better.
I rather eat what my great grandfather ate, and he lived to be 104 and very sharp, no mental slowdown like people get today. Speaking of mental slowdowns, do you know where it comes from? Aluminum in the diet. Where does the Aluminum come from? From all the machines that process food.
Again, this is not true. I'm not sure what you mean by "mental slowdown" but I'm not aware of any link suggested between aluminum and senile dementia. There was some worry early on about Alzheimer's and aluminum, but it did not hold up under further study.
Sour Cream. Sour Cream used to be made with bacteria and acidophilus. This is very healthy for people. Do you know how Sour Cream is made today? They take guar gum or starch and thicken milk. It is not even Sour Cream, but they keep calling the thick product that name
Ingredients: Grade A Cultured Cream. One ingredient. Maybe you should switch brands? I don't know about it being healthy for you, it's rather high in saturated fat.
Look up Free Radicals. Most foods are filled with them, and they cause people to age and get old and get sick and get cancer.
Food is not "full" of free radicals. Radicals are so amazingly reactive they aren't stable enough to last very long in food. In fact, preservatives like BHT are added to packaged foods in order to prevent the formation of radicals, which cause the product to break down quickly and have a shorter shelf life.
The truth is, they lived long and healthy lives, and they never had obesity problems until the rest of the world came along and started feeding them purified concentrated carbohydrate.
Doctors and scientists are so quick to point at ketosis as a dangerous thing, because it is a symptom of some real health problems like diabetes or extreme hardship like starvation or running a marathon. But, is ketosis dangerous? Has there been a single case of someone being hospitalized or killed by excessive ketones in the blood? I mean, seriously, they are excreted in the urine and expelled by breathing, and you have to drink an unhealthily small amount in order for a dangerous excess of ketones to build up in the blood. And, given a choice, I'd rather have unusually high levels of ketone bodies in my blood rather than high blood sugar. High blood sugar will destroy your retinas and screw up your kidneys and given enough time will wreak havok throughout your body. High ketone levels just give your breath an unusual odor.
Humans are known to live in the most extreme environments and conditions. If we were all ice-dwelling Eskimos with nothing to eat but animal flesh, might we not view a lack of ketosis brought on by eating sugars as an abnormal state, a symptom of some trouble in the body?
"Wow, it must have sucked to be an Inuit before "civilization" came along."
.they never had obesity problems until the rest of the world came along and started feeding them purified concentrated carbohydrate.
.
.lack of ketosis brought on by eating sugars. . .
The traditional Inuit diet is nothing like the Atkins diet. They do not eat steak. They eat animals, and good deal more vegetation them most people realize.
You should try living in a subsistance culture for at least a few months. It's quite the experience.
. .
What this got to do with wild rice and greens?
Has there been a single case of someone being hospitalized or killed by excessive ketones in the blood?
Sure. The old time frontiersmen even had a term for it, "Rabbit Death," because you were most likely to die from it by trying to subsist on rabbit. It can also be a problem in animal husbandry.
If we were all ice-dwelling Eskimos with nothing to eat but animal flesh. .
Are you? For that matter, neither are they.
. .
Ah yes, the fundamental slight of hand that the entire Atkins argument relies on.
I don't ever recall anyone suggesting that sugar cubes were a healthy diet, do you?
Carbohydrates don't mean "sugar cubes." Carbohydrates means "carrots" and "spinich."
KFG