Sports Nutrition, Hydration and Performance
An athlete’s diet has a significant impact on their performance, especially leading up to and during an important event. Specific nutritional recommendations have been established for athletes for before, during and after an event, in particular for fluid intake.
Water is an essential component of an athlete’s diet. The body is composed of 50-60% of water which equates to between 30 to 50 litres. It is very important to keep the body’s total water content constant, as dehydration can hinder an athlete’s performance. Water is lost from the body through sweat and evaporative losses, which increase dramatically during exercise and can result in more than 2% loss in body weight.
Dehydration causes a fall in plasma volume, which means that less oxygen can be transported around the body. This results in a rise in body temperature which is associated with an increase in muscle glycogen breakdown and can cause premature fatigue. Hypernatremia, low plasma sodium, is associated with loss of electrolytes in sweat. This is dangerous as electrolytes are associated with maintaining fluid balance. The body should be kept hydrated at all times during exercise to ensure cognitive and coordination functions are optimal.
Prior to an event, the goal is to ensure that any fluid and electrolyte deficiency is correct. Hydrating can begin progressively about 4 hours before the event. 5-7 ml of fluid per kg body weight is advised. Studies have shown that hyperhydration provides no clear physiological or performance advantages over euhydration, which means that the body’s water content is stable. Depending on the sport, fluid intake during exercise is also recommended to account for all the water lost from sweating. Rehydration after exercise is of great importance to revitalise the body and to counteract all the water and electrolytes lost during exercise.
There is an on-going debate over whether water or sports beverages are most beneficial for an athlete. Both fluid types work efficiently in maintaining hydration levels, but in terms of supplying energy and maintaining electrolyte balance during exercise a sports drink is the better option . Sports beverages are more beneficial to endurance athletes who train for longer than thirty minutes.
The carbohydrate content of a sports drink is recommended to be 6-8%. It can be used as another source of energy which will delay fatigue. The sodium content in sports drinks act as an electrolyte and helps maintain blood volume which aids in transporting oxygen around the body. Sports beverages are less beneficial to those who exercise for less than thirty minute as water lost through sweat and therefore dehydration is the main concern for them. For exercise routines that are less than thirty minutes, there are insufficient amounts of the glycogen store being used to truly benefit from an intake of a sports drink.
Recent finding have revealed that milk can be regarded as one of the best recovery fluids for resistance exercise due to its high nutrient content. It was found that milk is more effective at replacing sweat losses and maintaining euhydration than plain water or sports drinks ). This is due to the fact that milk contains all of the essential amino acids which are required to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. Carbohydrates within the milk and from other sources stimulate the release of insulin when ingested. Insulin and amino acids work together to increase the net muscle protein balance which is the balance of amino acids in the arteries and veins. This then stimulates net muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth .
In conclusion, what we can say for sure is that regardless of the type of fluid consumed, it is essential that athletes remain hydrated at all times especially in preparation, during and after an event.
Molecular Gastronomy
Wednesday 21 May 2014
what is diabetes
What is diabetes?
Diabetes is a complex group of diseases with a variety of causes. People with diabetes have high blood glucose, also called high blood sugar or hyperglycemia.
Diabetes is a disorder of metabolism—the way the body uses digested food for energy. The digestive tract breaks down carbohydrates—sugars and starches found in many foods—into glucose, a form of sugar that enters the bloodstream. With the help of the hormone insulin, cells throughout the body absorb glucose and use it for energy. Diabetes develops when the body doesn’t make enough insulin or is not able to use insulin effectively, or both.
Insulin is made in the pancreas, an organ located behind the stomach. The pancreas contains clusters of cells called islets. Beta cells within the islets make insulin and release it into the blood.
Islets within the pancreas contain beta cells,
which make insulin and release it into the blood.
If beta cells don’t produce enough insulin, or the body doesn’t respond to the insulin that is present, glucose builds up in the blood instead of being absorbed by cells in the body, leading to prediabetes or diabetes. Prediabetes is a condition in which blood glucose levels or A1C levels—which reflect average blood glucose levels—are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. In diabetes, the body’s cells are starved of energy despite high blood glucose levels.
Over time, high blood glucose damages nerves and blood vessels, leading to complications such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, dental disease, and amputations. Other complications of diabetes may include increased susceptibility to other diseases, loss of mobility with aging, depression, and pregnancy problems. No one is certain what starts the processes that cause diabetes, but scientists believe genes and environmental factors interact to cause diabetes in most cases.
The two main types of diabetes are type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. A third type, gestational diabetes, develops only during pregnancy. Other types of diabetes are caused by defects in specific genes, diseases of the pancreas, certain drugs or chemicals, infections, and other conditions. Some people show signs of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
What causes type 1 diabetes?
Type 1 diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin due to the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. In type 1 diabetes—an autoimmune disease—the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the beta cells. Normally, the immune system protects the body from infection by identifying and destroying bacteria, viruses, and other potentially harmful foreign substances. But in autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks the body’s own cells. In type 1 diabetes, beta cell destruction may take place over several years, but symptoms of the disease usually develop over a short period of time.
Type 1 diabetes typically occurs in children and young adults, though it can appear at any age. In the past, type 1 diabetes was called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.
Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) may be a slowly developing kind of type 1 diabetes. Diagnosis usually occurs after age 30. In LADA, as in type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system destroys the beta cells. At the time of diagnosis, people with LADA may still produce their own insulin, but eventually most will need insulin shots or an insulin pump to control blood glucose levels.
Genetic Susceptibility
Heredity plays an important part in determining who is likely to develop type 1 diabetes. Genes are passed down from biological parent to child. Genes carry instructions for making proteins that are needed for the body’s cells to function. Many genes, as well as interactions among genes, are thought to influence susceptibility to and protection from type 1 diabetes. The key genes may vary in different population groups. Variations in genes that affect more than 1 percent of a population group are called gene variants.
Certain gene variants that carry instructions for making proteins called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) on white blood cells are linked to the risk of developing type 1 diabetes. The proteins produced by HLA genes help determine whether the immune system recognizes a cell as part of the body or as foreign material. Some combinations of HLA gene variants predict that a person will be at higher risk for type 1 diabetes, while other combinations are protective or have no effect on risk.
While HLA genes are the major risk genes for type 1 diabetes, many additional risk genes or gene regions have been found. Not only can these genes help identify people at risk for type 1 diabetes, but they also provide important clues to help scientists better understand how the disease develops and identify potential targets for therapy and prevention.
Genetic testing can show what types of HLA genes a person carries and can reveal other genes linked to diabetes. However, most genetic testing is done in a research setting and is not yet available to individuals. Scientists are studying how the results of genetic testing can be used to improve type 1 diabetes prevention or treatment.
Autoimmune Destruction of Beta Cells
In type 1 diabetes, white blood cells called T cells attack and destroy beta cells. The process begins well before diabetes symptoms appear and continues after diagnosis. Often, type 1 diabetes is not diagnosed until most beta cells have already been destroyed. At this point, a person needs daily insulin treatment to survive. Finding ways to modify or stop this autoimmune process and preserve beta cell function is a major focus of current scientific research.
Recent research suggests insulin itself may be a key trigger of the immune attack on beta cells. The immune systems of people who are susceptible to developing type 1 diabetes respond to insulin as if it were a foreign substance, or antigen. To combat antigens, the body makes proteins called antibodies. Antibodies to insulin and other proteins produced by beta cells are found in people with type 1 diabetes. Researchers test for these antibodies to help identify people at increased risk of developing the disease. Testing the types and levels of antibodies in the blood can help determine whether a person has type 1 diabetes, LADA, or another type of diabetes.
Environmental Factors
Environmental factors, such as foods, viruses, and toxins, may play a role in the development of type 1 diabetes, but the exact nature of their role has not been determined. Some theories suggest that environmental factors trigger the autoimmune destruction of beta cells in people with a genetic susceptibility to diabetes. Other theories suggest that environmental factors play an ongoing role in diabetes, even after diagnosis.
Viruses and infections. A virus cannot cause diabetes on its own, but people are sometimes diagnosed with type 1 diabetes during or after a viral infection, suggesting a link between the two. Also, the onset of type 1 diabetes occurs more frequently during the winter when viral infections are more common. Viruses possibly associated with type 1 diabetes include coxsackievirus B, cytomegalovirus, adenovirus, rubella, and mumps. Scientists have described several ways these viruses may damage or destroy beta cells or possibly trigger an autoimmune response in susceptible people. For example, anti-islet antibodies have been found in patients with congenital rubella syndrome, and cytomegalovirus has been associated with significant beta cell damage and acute pancreatitis––inflammation of the pancreas. Scientists are trying to identify a virus that can cause type 1 diabetes so that a vaccine might be developed to prevent the disease.
Infant feeding practices. Some studies have suggested that dietary factors may raise or lower the risk of developing type 1 diabetes. For example, breastfed infants and infants receiving vitamin D supplements may have a reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes, while early exposure to cow’s milk and cereal proteins may increase risk. More research is needed to clarify how infant nutrition affects the risk for type 1 diabetes.
Diabetes is a complex group of diseases with a variety of causes. People with diabetes have high blood glucose, also called high blood sugar or hyperglycemia.
Diabetes is a disorder of metabolism—the way the body uses digested food for energy. The digestive tract breaks down carbohydrates—sugars and starches found in many foods—into glucose, a form of sugar that enters the bloodstream. With the help of the hormone insulin, cells throughout the body absorb glucose and use it for energy. Diabetes develops when the body doesn’t make enough insulin or is not able to use insulin effectively, or both.
Insulin is made in the pancreas, an organ located behind the stomach. The pancreas contains clusters of cells called islets. Beta cells within the islets make insulin and release it into the blood.
Islets within the pancreas contain beta cells,
which make insulin and release it into the blood.
If beta cells don’t produce enough insulin, or the body doesn’t respond to the insulin that is present, glucose builds up in the blood instead of being absorbed by cells in the body, leading to prediabetes or diabetes. Prediabetes is a condition in which blood glucose levels or A1C levels—which reflect average blood glucose levels—are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. In diabetes, the body’s cells are starved of energy despite high blood glucose levels.
Over time, high blood glucose damages nerves and blood vessels, leading to complications such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, dental disease, and amputations. Other complications of diabetes may include increased susceptibility to other diseases, loss of mobility with aging, depression, and pregnancy problems. No one is certain what starts the processes that cause diabetes, but scientists believe genes and environmental factors interact to cause diabetes in most cases.
The two main types of diabetes are type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. A third type, gestational diabetes, develops only during pregnancy. Other types of diabetes are caused by defects in specific genes, diseases of the pancreas, certain drugs or chemicals, infections, and other conditions. Some people show signs of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
What causes type 1 diabetes?
Type 1 diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin due to the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. In type 1 diabetes—an autoimmune disease—the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the beta cells. Normally, the immune system protects the body from infection by identifying and destroying bacteria, viruses, and other potentially harmful foreign substances. But in autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks the body’s own cells. In type 1 diabetes, beta cell destruction may take place over several years, but symptoms of the disease usually develop over a short period of time.
Type 1 diabetes typically occurs in children and young adults, though it can appear at any age. In the past, type 1 diabetes was called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.
Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) may be a slowly developing kind of type 1 diabetes. Diagnosis usually occurs after age 30. In LADA, as in type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system destroys the beta cells. At the time of diagnosis, people with LADA may still produce their own insulin, but eventually most will need insulin shots or an insulin pump to control blood glucose levels.
Genetic Susceptibility
Heredity plays an important part in determining who is likely to develop type 1 diabetes. Genes are passed down from biological parent to child. Genes carry instructions for making proteins that are needed for the body’s cells to function. Many genes, as well as interactions among genes, are thought to influence susceptibility to and protection from type 1 diabetes. The key genes may vary in different population groups. Variations in genes that affect more than 1 percent of a population group are called gene variants.
Certain gene variants that carry instructions for making proteins called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) on white blood cells are linked to the risk of developing type 1 diabetes. The proteins produced by HLA genes help determine whether the immune system recognizes a cell as part of the body or as foreign material. Some combinations of HLA gene variants predict that a person will be at higher risk for type 1 diabetes, while other combinations are protective or have no effect on risk.
While HLA genes are the major risk genes for type 1 diabetes, many additional risk genes or gene regions have been found. Not only can these genes help identify people at risk for type 1 diabetes, but they also provide important clues to help scientists better understand how the disease develops and identify potential targets for therapy and prevention.
Genetic testing can show what types of HLA genes a person carries and can reveal other genes linked to diabetes. However, most genetic testing is done in a research setting and is not yet available to individuals. Scientists are studying how the results of genetic testing can be used to improve type 1 diabetes prevention or treatment.
Autoimmune Destruction of Beta Cells
In type 1 diabetes, white blood cells called T cells attack and destroy beta cells. The process begins well before diabetes symptoms appear and continues after diagnosis. Often, type 1 diabetes is not diagnosed until most beta cells have already been destroyed. At this point, a person needs daily insulin treatment to survive. Finding ways to modify or stop this autoimmune process and preserve beta cell function is a major focus of current scientific research.
Recent research suggests insulin itself may be a key trigger of the immune attack on beta cells. The immune systems of people who are susceptible to developing type 1 diabetes respond to insulin as if it were a foreign substance, or antigen. To combat antigens, the body makes proteins called antibodies. Antibodies to insulin and other proteins produced by beta cells are found in people with type 1 diabetes. Researchers test for these antibodies to help identify people at increased risk of developing the disease. Testing the types and levels of antibodies in the blood can help determine whether a person has type 1 diabetes, LADA, or another type of diabetes.
Environmental Factors
Environmental factors, such as foods, viruses, and toxins, may play a role in the development of type 1 diabetes, but the exact nature of their role has not been determined. Some theories suggest that environmental factors trigger the autoimmune destruction of beta cells in people with a genetic susceptibility to diabetes. Other theories suggest that environmental factors play an ongoing role in diabetes, even after diagnosis.
Viruses and infections. A virus cannot cause diabetes on its own, but people are sometimes diagnosed with type 1 diabetes during or after a viral infection, suggesting a link between the two. Also, the onset of type 1 diabetes occurs more frequently during the winter when viral infections are more common. Viruses possibly associated with type 1 diabetes include coxsackievirus B, cytomegalovirus, adenovirus, rubella, and mumps. Scientists have described several ways these viruses may damage or destroy beta cells or possibly trigger an autoimmune response in susceptible people. For example, anti-islet antibodies have been found in patients with congenital rubella syndrome, and cytomegalovirus has been associated with significant beta cell damage and acute pancreatitis––inflammation of the pancreas. Scientists are trying to identify a virus that can cause type 1 diabetes so that a vaccine might be developed to prevent the disease.
Infant feeding practices. Some studies have suggested that dietary factors may raise or lower the risk of developing type 1 diabetes. For example, breastfed infants and infants receiving vitamin D supplements may have a reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes, while early exposure to cow’s milk and cereal proteins may increase risk. More research is needed to clarify how infant nutrition affects the risk for type 1 diabetes.
FOWL PLAY
Fowl play
They are the ultimate 21st-century food - quick, easy and highly processed. But if you knew about the high percentage of skin, the water, and the pulped carcasses that go into some of them, would you be so keen to reach into the freezer for chicken nuggets? In a major investigation
Europe is big on breasts. The Japanese prefer thighs, dark and gamey ones. Feet are a bit of a fetish in China. Gizzards go to Russia. But smooth, damp slabs of white flesh are what we British buy when we want chicken. That leaves the carcasses, and skin, mountains and mountains of it - pale, flaccid, pimply, raw, ripped off by 100,000 shift workers' hands, from Thailand to Brazil, from the Netherlands to Norfolk. The skin goes around the world for chicken nuggets.
I am watching an army of small, perfectly formed nuggets march along a conveyor belt, with manufacturer Gary Stiles, at his factory in Wiltshire. He has spent his life in the meat trade. At one end of the factory line is a pulp of half-frozen meat and skin in a giant stainless-steel hopper. Minced and mixed beyond recognition, it is being extruded through a small tube on to metal plates. These press it into pale pink nugget shapes which then trundle on down the belt. Through a dust bath of flour and seasoning they go, before being lowered under a sheet of constantly pouring batter. Then on in juddering formation through a tray of scattered breadcrumbs and into a vast vat of boiling oil for 30 seconds.
As they emerge, workers in white coats, blue hairnets and white boots catch them, bag them in plastic, and post them back for the last rites. The belt carries them into a nitrogen tunnel to take them down to freezing and finally out into a cardboard box, labelled with his own brand Pure Organics For Georgia's Sake or Tesco organic chicken nuggets, according to the orders of the day.
Above the roar of machinery, Stiles explains that you need some skin to keep the nuggets succulent; 15% is about right, he reckons. Mixed in that proportion with breast and dark meat, it matches what you would get if you were eating a whole bird, and he knows exactly where his comes from. Like the rest of his meat, his skin is bought from two organic farms that he knows personally, one in England, one in Wales. Unlike some manufacturers, he won't use more skin than that, and he won't use mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is obtained by pushing the carcass through a giant teabag-like screen to produce a slurry of protein, then bound back together with polyphosphates and gums. Nor does he use other additives.
Stiles likes to think that his nuggets, at £1.99 for 250g, are, like the beer, "reassuringly expensive". But the trouble is, once you've minced bits of a chicken to a pulp, that pulp could be anything from anywhere. With other manufacturers, sometimes it is. Recycled pet food, breasts injected with pig and cattle proteins, banned carcinogenic antibiotics - they've all been found by the authorities recently in chicken destined for processing.
Denatured and deracinated, the chicken nugget is a symbol of the way we eat now. It is the epitome of our 21st-century system of globalised, industrial food production.
Like much of our diet today, the nugget is processed so highly that its taste and texture depend as much on engineering and additives as on any raw ingredients, making it an easy way to disguise cheap or adulterated food. And just as the nugget's form is far removed from its contents, so we have become completely divorced from the source of those contents, from the animals that provide them and from the people who transform them. The nugget is, in fact, the product of a transnational chain so fragmented and complex that even those in the business do not fully understand how some parts of it work.
It depends on the industrialisation of livestock, on an endless supply of uniform factory birds to fit standardised factory machines. It depends, too, on the mass migration of workers, both legal and illegal, since adding the value to it requires an equally endless supply of low-value labour.
The rise of the nugget has been dizzying. We bought 42 million packs of them - that's £79m worth, or 21,000 tonnes - in the UK last year, just to eat at home, according to analysts Taylor Nelson Sofres. British adults also ate 73 million meals of them away from home in the same period. Children probably ate more. Served in school dining halls, fast-food outlets, at hospital bedsides, and on the tables of harassed parents, nuggets have become ubiquitous. Mass production has created a homogeneity in our diets at a time when the origins of our food are more varied than ever. If you want to know what goes into your nuggets, you need to look to the commodity markets, exchange rates and tariffs. The label is not the place to find out.
One story earlier this year highlighted just how little we know about what lies inside the golden breadcrumb coating. When Leicestershire trading standards received a complaint from a member of the public about the quality of some nuggets, they decided to test 21 samples from 17 different shops, including the major supermarkets. In one-third of the samples, the label was misleading about the nugget's meat content. One pack of nuggets contained only 16% meat, 30% less than it claimed. (And skin, of course, counts as "meat"). The trading standards officials are unable to identify the brands involved for legal reasons. Instead, they gave a warning to the worst offender. Subsequent tests recently have shown that the manufacturer has not changed its ways. Look further back down the chain, and it becomes clear that doctoring has become routine.
Even if the percentage of meat in a nugget looks reassuringly high, you may be surprised by what exactly counts as meat. Nugget manufacturers source their meat in various ways. Some use British chicken. Some buy high-quality meat direct from Thailand or Brazil. Some buy whatever is cheapest on the market, which is often frozen Thai and Brazilian chicken imported into the EU through Holland's ports.
The Netherlands is the centre of the "tumbling" industry, a process in which chicken is bulked up with water and other additives. Dutch processors defrost the meat and then inject it with dozens of needles, or tumble it in giant cement-mixer-like machines, until the water is absorbed. Salted meat attracts only a fraction of the EU tariff applied to fresh meat. The tumbling helps dilute the salt to make the chicken palatable, so as well as making huge profits selling water, the processors can avoid substantial duties. Once it has been tumbled, the meat is refrozen and shipped on for further processing.
The story gets less appetising still. One of the things that has puzzled observers of the poultry industry is how some processors manage to get so much water to stay in the chicken. Why doesn't it just flood out when it is turned into a takeaway or a ready meal or a chicken nugget? Hull trading standards officer John Sandford has spent over five years investigating. The answer he discovered was profoundly shocking.
DNA tests specially developed by Sandford with the public analyst laboratory in Manchester enabled the English food standards agency to identify lots of water (in one case 43%) and traces of pork proteins in samples of Dutch chicken breasts labelled "halal". Six months later, Irish authorities made an even more unsettling discovery in chicken: undeclared bovine proteins. Seventeen samples from Dutch processors contained them. Some manufacturers were using a new technique - injecting so-called hydrolysed proteins. These are proteins extracted at high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis from old animals or parts of animals which are no use for food, such as skin, feathers, hide, bone and ligaments, and rather like cosmetic collagen implants, they make the flesh swell up and retain liquid.
These discoveries raised as many questions as they answered. What kind of cow products had been used to produce bovine proteins? If the processors were not declaring the presence of bovine proteins on the labels, could they be trusted to follow the regulations on removing certain high-risk cattle materials from the food chain? The possibility of BSE in chicken meat had raised its ugly head.
Chicken from the Dutch processors named by the Irish authorities remains widely available in the UK. Industry sources say that some nugget manufacturers at the bottom end of the market buy tumbled Dutch chicken, although they would be unaware that some processors' meat contains bovine proteins.
Others nuggets will be made from various bits of British chicken. Some are made from chunks of chicken breast and skin. Some are mostly skin, or skin and MRM. If tumbled meat is being used, the chicken is defrosted in microwaves before being minced into nuggets. Manufacturers can neutralise the salty taste by adding sugar in various forms, often as dextrose or lactose, and put flavour back in with chicken flavourings in the meat pulp, in the batter or in the breadcrumbs. Other additives can help restore the texture. Soya proteins are the commonest used, with gums as emulsifiers, to stop the whole mix separating out again. Phosphates also help glue up the proteins. Some nuggets are made in Britain, but increasingly nuggets are also imported ready-made from developing countries. If a manufacturer does anything to the chicken in this country, it can be legally labelled "produced in England". To get to the beginning of the nugget story, though, we must head east, to a land of chicken and cheap labour.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise near CP Towers in Bangkok is chilly, its automatic doors and air conditioning sealing it off from the blast of 40C heat outside - and the choking smog of east Asia's fastest-developing city. There is one family group sharing a tray of chicken nuggets - a Thai mother and father with a fat little boy bursting from a designer leather jacket, but the other patrons are all alone, disconnected, eating their fast food with silent efficiency. The nuggets slip down. Hot and crisp on the outside, soft and moist inside, they have that textureless, easy-on-the-jaw, flavoured "mouth feel" that children like.
A McDonald's supplier claims the invention of the nugget in 1979. McDonald's, worried by the trend away from red meat towards "healthier" white meat, asked Keystone Foods if it could produce a boneless chicken finger food which would be in keeping with its other fast food. Keystone laboratories came up with McNuggets, little gobbets of minced, reconstituted chicken, battered and breaded.
As a nugget manufacturer, Gary Stiles thinks that we have become too disconnected from our food and disconnection has bred fear and mistrust. He was forced to remake the connection between what he made and what he fed his children when his daughter, Georgia, the Georgia of his brand name, turned out to be autistic. He and his wife started to research the link between diet and illness. He now feels that "if you put junk in, you get junk out", and he's not prepared to do that any more.
They are the ultimate 21st-century food - quick, easy and highly processed. But if you knew about the high percentage of skin, the water, and the pulped carcasses that go into some of them, would you be so keen to reach into the freezer for chicken nuggets? In a major investigation
Europe is big on breasts. The Japanese prefer thighs, dark and gamey ones. Feet are a bit of a fetish in China. Gizzards go to Russia. But smooth, damp slabs of white flesh are what we British buy when we want chicken. That leaves the carcasses, and skin, mountains and mountains of it - pale, flaccid, pimply, raw, ripped off by 100,000 shift workers' hands, from Thailand to Brazil, from the Netherlands to Norfolk. The skin goes around the world for chicken nuggets.
I am watching an army of small, perfectly formed nuggets march along a conveyor belt, with manufacturer Gary Stiles, at his factory in Wiltshire. He has spent his life in the meat trade. At one end of the factory line is a pulp of half-frozen meat and skin in a giant stainless-steel hopper. Minced and mixed beyond recognition, it is being extruded through a small tube on to metal plates. These press it into pale pink nugget shapes which then trundle on down the belt. Through a dust bath of flour and seasoning they go, before being lowered under a sheet of constantly pouring batter. Then on in juddering formation through a tray of scattered breadcrumbs and into a vast vat of boiling oil for 30 seconds.
As they emerge, workers in white coats, blue hairnets and white boots catch them, bag them in plastic, and post them back for the last rites. The belt carries them into a nitrogen tunnel to take them down to freezing and finally out into a cardboard box, labelled with his own brand Pure Organics For Georgia's Sake or Tesco organic chicken nuggets, according to the orders of the day.
Above the roar of machinery, Stiles explains that you need some skin to keep the nuggets succulent; 15% is about right, he reckons. Mixed in that proportion with breast and dark meat, it matches what you would get if you were eating a whole bird, and he knows exactly where his comes from. Like the rest of his meat, his skin is bought from two organic farms that he knows personally, one in England, one in Wales. Unlike some manufacturers, he won't use more skin than that, and he won't use mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is obtained by pushing the carcass through a giant teabag-like screen to produce a slurry of protein, then bound back together with polyphosphates and gums. Nor does he use other additives.
Stiles likes to think that his nuggets, at £1.99 for 250g, are, like the beer, "reassuringly expensive". But the trouble is, once you've minced bits of a chicken to a pulp, that pulp could be anything from anywhere. With other manufacturers, sometimes it is. Recycled pet food, breasts injected with pig and cattle proteins, banned carcinogenic antibiotics - they've all been found by the authorities recently in chicken destined for processing.
Denatured and deracinated, the chicken nugget is a symbol of the way we eat now. It is the epitome of our 21st-century system of globalised, industrial food production.
Like much of our diet today, the nugget is processed so highly that its taste and texture depend as much on engineering and additives as on any raw ingredients, making it an easy way to disguise cheap or adulterated food. And just as the nugget's form is far removed from its contents, so we have become completely divorced from the source of those contents, from the animals that provide them and from the people who transform them. The nugget is, in fact, the product of a transnational chain so fragmented and complex that even those in the business do not fully understand how some parts of it work.
It depends on the industrialisation of livestock, on an endless supply of uniform factory birds to fit standardised factory machines. It depends, too, on the mass migration of workers, both legal and illegal, since adding the value to it requires an equally endless supply of low-value labour.
The rise of the nugget has been dizzying. We bought 42 million packs of them - that's £79m worth, or 21,000 tonnes - in the UK last year, just to eat at home, according to analysts Taylor Nelson Sofres. British adults also ate 73 million meals of them away from home in the same period. Children probably ate more. Served in school dining halls, fast-food outlets, at hospital bedsides, and on the tables of harassed parents, nuggets have become ubiquitous. Mass production has created a homogeneity in our diets at a time when the origins of our food are more varied than ever. If you want to know what goes into your nuggets, you need to look to the commodity markets, exchange rates and tariffs. The label is not the place to find out.
One story earlier this year highlighted just how little we know about what lies inside the golden breadcrumb coating. When Leicestershire trading standards received a complaint from a member of the public about the quality of some nuggets, they decided to test 21 samples from 17 different shops, including the major supermarkets. In one-third of the samples, the label was misleading about the nugget's meat content. One pack of nuggets contained only 16% meat, 30% less than it claimed. (And skin, of course, counts as "meat"). The trading standards officials are unable to identify the brands involved for legal reasons. Instead, they gave a warning to the worst offender. Subsequent tests recently have shown that the manufacturer has not changed its ways. Look further back down the chain, and it becomes clear that doctoring has become routine.
Even if the percentage of meat in a nugget looks reassuringly high, you may be surprised by what exactly counts as meat. Nugget manufacturers source their meat in various ways. Some use British chicken. Some buy high-quality meat direct from Thailand or Brazil. Some buy whatever is cheapest on the market, which is often frozen Thai and Brazilian chicken imported into the EU through Holland's ports.
The Netherlands is the centre of the "tumbling" industry, a process in which chicken is bulked up with water and other additives. Dutch processors defrost the meat and then inject it with dozens of needles, or tumble it in giant cement-mixer-like machines, until the water is absorbed. Salted meat attracts only a fraction of the EU tariff applied to fresh meat. The tumbling helps dilute the salt to make the chicken palatable, so as well as making huge profits selling water, the processors can avoid substantial duties. Once it has been tumbled, the meat is refrozen and shipped on for further processing.
The story gets less appetising still. One of the things that has puzzled observers of the poultry industry is how some processors manage to get so much water to stay in the chicken. Why doesn't it just flood out when it is turned into a takeaway or a ready meal or a chicken nugget? Hull trading standards officer John Sandford has spent over five years investigating. The answer he discovered was profoundly shocking.
DNA tests specially developed by Sandford with the public analyst laboratory in Manchester enabled the English food standards agency to identify lots of water (in one case 43%) and traces of pork proteins in samples of Dutch chicken breasts labelled "halal". Six months later, Irish authorities made an even more unsettling discovery in chicken: undeclared bovine proteins. Seventeen samples from Dutch processors contained them. Some manufacturers were using a new technique - injecting so-called hydrolysed proteins. These are proteins extracted at high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis from old animals or parts of animals which are no use for food, such as skin, feathers, hide, bone and ligaments, and rather like cosmetic collagen implants, they make the flesh swell up and retain liquid.
These discoveries raised as many questions as they answered. What kind of cow products had been used to produce bovine proteins? If the processors were not declaring the presence of bovine proteins on the labels, could they be trusted to follow the regulations on removing certain high-risk cattle materials from the food chain? The possibility of BSE in chicken meat had raised its ugly head.
Chicken from the Dutch processors named by the Irish authorities remains widely available in the UK. Industry sources say that some nugget manufacturers at the bottom end of the market buy tumbled Dutch chicken, although they would be unaware that some processors' meat contains bovine proteins.
Others nuggets will be made from various bits of British chicken. Some are made from chunks of chicken breast and skin. Some are mostly skin, or skin and MRM. If tumbled meat is being used, the chicken is defrosted in microwaves before being minced into nuggets. Manufacturers can neutralise the salty taste by adding sugar in various forms, often as dextrose or lactose, and put flavour back in with chicken flavourings in the meat pulp, in the batter or in the breadcrumbs. Other additives can help restore the texture. Soya proteins are the commonest used, with gums as emulsifiers, to stop the whole mix separating out again. Phosphates also help glue up the proteins. Some nuggets are made in Britain, but increasingly nuggets are also imported ready-made from developing countries. If a manufacturer does anything to the chicken in this country, it can be legally labelled "produced in England". To get to the beginning of the nugget story, though, we must head east, to a land of chicken and cheap labour.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise near CP Towers in Bangkok is chilly, its automatic doors and air conditioning sealing it off from the blast of 40C heat outside - and the choking smog of east Asia's fastest-developing city. There is one family group sharing a tray of chicken nuggets - a Thai mother and father with a fat little boy bursting from a designer leather jacket, but the other patrons are all alone, disconnected, eating their fast food with silent efficiency. The nuggets slip down. Hot and crisp on the outside, soft and moist inside, they have that textureless, easy-on-the-jaw, flavoured "mouth feel" that children like.
A McDonald's supplier claims the invention of the nugget in 1979. McDonald's, worried by the trend away from red meat towards "healthier" white meat, asked Keystone Foods if it could produce a boneless chicken finger food which would be in keeping with its other fast food. Keystone laboratories came up with McNuggets, little gobbets of minced, reconstituted chicken, battered and breaded.
As a nugget manufacturer, Gary Stiles thinks that we have become too disconnected from our food and disconnection has bred fear and mistrust. He was forced to remake the connection between what he made and what he fed his children when his daughter, Georgia, the Georgia of his brand name, turned out to be autistic. He and his wife started to research the link between diet and illness. He now feels that "if you put junk in, you get junk out", and he's not prepared to do that any more.
Wednesday 14 May 2014
se my nominee page here:http://dannythechef52-9-member-nominee.htm
Espresso machilada and a cappuchino. Wonderful full flavoured Italian coffee to start the day of.(when in roam). Today we go to visit the excavated ruins of the city of Pompeii which was covered completely in 79 a.d after the eruption of mount Vesuvius. The after effects of the earthquake didn't destroy the city it engulfed, it preserved it. This means heading off from Casa Del Poppolo to Pompeii via Naples. Italy is only 150 yrs approx. united. So when you leave one area and cross into another you could get the feeling that you are in a different country. It is unmistakable to avoid pizza while in Rome. Rome pizza is traditionally thin and crispy, while in Napoli there is three strict criteria to be adhered to qualify as Neapolitan pizza
. (1) Tomato Sauce.(wonderfully baby like plum tomatoes called San Marzano are the only tomatoes used for tomato sauce in Napoli. A wonderfully sweet sun ripened tomato simply seasoned and pulped into a sauce. A definite must for any food lover. (unfortunately the food in Italy was not always as rich as today. For years the diet consisted of vegetables, fish sauces (fish fermented for four days crushed and mixed with white sauces) and pulses and beans. It was not until Christopher Columbus discovered the new world and brought things like potatoes etc. to Europe did the Italian diet improve. For years the tomato was considered a poisonous fruit, because they didn't know how to use them.It grew every where. Not Until one day someone decided to eat one and like nowadays the tomato became an important ingredient in the Italian diet)
(2). Unlike pizza in Rome, Neapolitan pizza has a thick outer crust narrowing to a thin crisp centre.
(3) The oven for cooking Neapolitan pizzas must be domed shape.
The fare on offer today in the Tiberius restaurant was exquisite tasting Neapolitan pizza.
Bianca - cheese and ham (no tomato sauce)
Margheritta - Cheese , tomato and , Basil,
Neapolitan - Pastry base with San Marzano tomato sauce.
Also associated with pizza is Mozzarella cheese. But not mozzarella as we know it. To Italians mozzarella does not come in a block. Traditionally mozzarella is made by separating curd and whey. Then the curd is warmed in a vat and stretched by hand . The cheese is pinched of into balls and then stored in the whey. You can see finger marks on the balls where the cheese was pinched away and formed into a ball. The small town of Cassino , between Rome and Napoli is rich in fertile lands and green pastures. People seem to mispronounce the Buffala part. Most people outside of Italy refer to it as buffalo Mozzarella. An O at the end of the word in certain Italian words is masculine. But as we know bulls don't have milk. So therefore the pronunciation is "buffala Mozzarella" (feminine). And another important interesting fact to note is that you will never find fruit (pineapple /orange etc ) on a pizza in Italy or will you find any more than three ingredients on a pizza for the simple reason they don't like to complicate or overpower flavours with other flavours.
Because of the lush green pastures it is an area that is flush of olive trees (which are planted this time of the year and should be just beginning to blossom. The olive is pressed in November to create extra virgin olive oil "often described as liquid Gold" The tour guide informed us to buy a good quality olive oil at wholesale price in Italy is €6. They don't sell cheaper at a loss to anyone. Considering the yield of any olive press is between 10-17%.
This year is predicted to be a good year for harvesting unlike the last few years.
But that's not the reason for telling you that, the reason is next time your in the shop and you buy olive oil at €6 euro bottle or less you need to question the quality of the oil.
Lardo Muffato.
IN Ireland we have one or two remaining Cafollas left. One is close to us, in Ccastlebar town. A must when we go to Castlebar shopping etc. There chips are famous and the reason being is they cook them at low temperature, in lard, and use Maris piper chipping potatoes. The cooking in lard is a tradition associated with the Campian Region of Italy. There they have specially moulded lard and they serve it at meal times.
Lemons are a tradition to the Campian region also. They are bigger than normal lemons . As you will see in the slide show at the end. The lemons are used to make "Lemon cello" a traditional Lemon liqueur meant to be sipped rathered than knocked back. Lemoncello is associared with Campian, Roman and Napoli regions. After a long day at work or on holidays, the Italians recommend ice cooled (lemoncello) cold to revitalise you, but be careful one or two is plenty or you may be looking for the short way home.
Raphael Esposito
I feel i must mention this guy,he has nothing to do with the Vatican,Colosseum or any archaeological sites in Rome.he was commissioned to create a pizza for the visit of queen marghareita as mentioned earlier in the blog there are three types of pizza associated with Naples.
Bianca
Napoleon
Margherita
We are all well aware of what margherita pizza is but where did it come from?having made the first two pizzas Raphael decided on a third one it was to consist of tomato sauce mozzarella cheese and basil,on the day of the royal visit queen margherita sampled all three pizzas and liked them all but liked the third one the most,because of her visit Raphael named the pizza margherita after the queen and that's how the margherita pizza came about and it is the pizza used as a base for all other pizzas and is most popular in the western world outside of Italy.
And finally we get to the most important part the day excursion to Pompeii,Pompeii was engulfed by lava from the eruption of mt Vesuvius(79A.D),thankfully the lava helped preserve the city of Pompeii and with over two hundred years work excavating the site we are beginning to get a better insight to how they lived in 79AD as you will see in the following photographs of the streets , ruins, houses,shops and theatres the town was quiet self sufficient and also there were remains of public swinning pools and steam baths as well as bars and Brothels(10).Also the remains of 25 bakeries,46 drinking wells.the city of Pompeii had running water connected 20yrs B.C The water was distributed through lead pipes,which are still visible.unaware of the lead poisoning aspect people were known to have gone mad(not just peasants but royalty also(Nero) also suffered
from the amount of lead in there digestive system. There are also remains and evidence pointing to the belief restaurants existed as far back as 79 A.d in Italy. You will clearly see the 4 well terracotta style hot food storage. You will see that there were four pots and as described earlier the diet consisted of bread , grains, pulses and fish sauces. This is where the food was kept warm for hours. Stone ovens, wheel grooves,functioning water, mosaic floors ceilings.
Being a port town, Pompeii was a thriving business town. The land was some of the most fertile in Italy and Europe. The excavated site is now about 9 kl from the port.This shows how far back the lava forced the sea. AS said earlier the last explosion was 1944. The volcano Vesuvius is still active today and takes 30 - 70 yrs roughly to erupt.Experts say it will explode again and the most notice anyone will be given is 3days max. They had a trial evacuation last year in Napoli . There are 600,000 people living in the area and the army said it will take 4-5 weeks to evacuate them.So its just another catastrophe waiting to happen.
So getting away from pizza etc, here is a wonderful idea for an afternoon snack with crisp croistini.
1 Camembert cheese (250 gramme)
2 Basil leaves
2-3 sun dried tomatoes
white wine
2 teaspoon pesto.
1 roisti pan
2 tsp Calvados
Cut Camembert in half length ways. Place one half in roisti pan. Finely shred basil leaves and sun dried tomatoes . Place in centre of cheese. Brush with basil pesto and pour some white wine onto cheese also. Place other Camembert on top. Lightly press down, and bake in the oven at 180 c for ten minutes. Remove from the oven and flambé with calvados. Eat with crisp croistini
So my next destination on my food travels was to be france , keen fan of molecular cooking ,
and Brillant Savarins "physiology of taste". So the opportunity has arisen to be representative for Ireland and the U.k, in the Paris food trip 2014 . So I said to my self why not give it a go . What motivation do you need to enter a competition of this calibre to go to Paris the home of cooking, the Eifle Tower and the Louvre. The chance to meet fellow food enthusiasts and taste the delicacies that Paris has to offer, and also the chance of meeting esteemed chefs and also the idea of a michelin star meal is appetizing also.
So come on vote for me to be your Irish and English representative in the Gourmandize food trip 2014.
You wont be dissapointed.
. (1) Tomato Sauce.(wonderfully baby like plum tomatoes called San Marzano are the only tomatoes used for tomato sauce in Napoli. A wonderfully sweet sun ripened tomato simply seasoned and pulped into a sauce. A definite must for any food lover. (unfortunately the food in Italy was not always as rich as today. For years the diet consisted of vegetables, fish sauces (fish fermented for four days crushed and mixed with white sauces) and pulses and beans. It was not until Christopher Columbus discovered the new world and brought things like potatoes etc. to Europe did the Italian diet improve. For years the tomato was considered a poisonous fruit, because they didn't know how to use them.It grew every where. Not Until one day someone decided to eat one and like nowadays the tomato became an important ingredient in the Italian diet)
(2). Unlike pizza in Rome, Neapolitan pizza has a thick outer crust narrowing to a thin crisp centre.
(3) The oven for cooking Neapolitan pizzas must be domed shape.
The fare on offer today in the Tiberius restaurant was exquisite tasting Neapolitan pizza.
Bianca - cheese and ham (no tomato sauce)
Margheritta - Cheese , tomato and , Basil,
Neapolitan - Pastry base with San Marzano tomato sauce.
Also associated with pizza is Mozzarella cheese. But not mozzarella as we know it. To Italians mozzarella does not come in a block. Traditionally mozzarella is made by separating curd and whey. Then the curd is warmed in a vat and stretched by hand . The cheese is pinched of into balls and then stored in the whey. You can see finger marks on the balls where the cheese was pinched away and formed into a ball. The small town of Cassino , between Rome and Napoli is rich in fertile lands and green pastures. People seem to mispronounce the Buffala part. Most people outside of Italy refer to it as buffalo Mozzarella. An O at the end of the word in certain Italian words is masculine. But as we know bulls don't have milk. So therefore the pronunciation is "buffala Mozzarella" (feminine). And another important interesting fact to note is that you will never find fruit (pineapple /orange etc ) on a pizza in Italy or will you find any more than three ingredients on a pizza for the simple reason they don't like to complicate or overpower flavours with other flavours.
Because of the lush green pastures it is an area that is flush of olive trees (which are planted this time of the year and should be just beginning to blossom. The olive is pressed in November to create extra virgin olive oil "often described as liquid Gold" The tour guide informed us to buy a good quality olive oil at wholesale price in Italy is €6. They don't sell cheaper at a loss to anyone. Considering the yield of any olive press is between 10-17%.
This year is predicted to be a good year for harvesting unlike the last few years.
But that's not the reason for telling you that, the reason is next time your in the shop and you buy olive oil at €6 euro bottle or less you need to question the quality of the oil.
Lardo Muffato.
IN Ireland we have one or two remaining Cafollas left. One is close to us, in Ccastlebar town. A must when we go to Castlebar shopping etc. There chips are famous and the reason being is they cook them at low temperature, in lard, and use Maris piper chipping potatoes. The cooking in lard is a tradition associated with the Campian Region of Italy. There they have specially moulded lard and they serve it at meal times.
Lemons are a tradition to the Campian region also. They are bigger than normal lemons . As you will see in the slide show at the end. The lemons are used to make "Lemon cello" a traditional Lemon liqueur meant to be sipped rathered than knocked back. Lemoncello is associared with Campian, Roman and Napoli regions. After a long day at work or on holidays, the Italians recommend ice cooled (lemoncello) cold to revitalise you, but be careful one or two is plenty or you may be looking for the short way home.
Raphael Esposito
I feel i must mention this guy,he has nothing to do with the Vatican,Colosseum or any archaeological sites in Rome.he was commissioned to create a pizza for the visit of queen marghareita as mentioned earlier in the blog there are three types of pizza associated with Naples.
Bianca
Napoleon
Margherita
We are all well aware of what margherita pizza is but where did it come from?having made the first two pizzas Raphael decided on a third one it was to consist of tomato sauce mozzarella cheese and basil,on the day of the royal visit queen margherita sampled all three pizzas and liked them all but liked the third one the most,because of her visit Raphael named the pizza margherita after the queen and that's how the margherita pizza came about and it is the pizza used as a base for all other pizzas and is most popular in the western world outside of Italy.
And finally we get to the most important part the day excursion to Pompeii,Pompeii was engulfed by lava from the eruption of mt Vesuvius(79A.D),thankfully the lava helped preserve the city of Pompeii and with over two hundred years work excavating the site we are beginning to get a better insight to how they lived in 79AD as you will see in the following photographs of the streets , ruins, houses,shops and theatres the town was quiet self sufficient and also there were remains of public swinning pools and steam baths as well as bars and Brothels(10).Also the remains of 25 bakeries,46 drinking wells.the city of Pompeii had running water connected 20yrs B.C The water was distributed through lead pipes,which are still visible.unaware of the lead poisoning aspect people were known to have gone mad(not just peasants but royalty also(Nero) also suffered
from the amount of lead in there digestive system. There are also remains and evidence pointing to the belief restaurants existed as far back as 79 A.d in Italy. You will clearly see the 4 well terracotta style hot food storage. You will see that there were four pots and as described earlier the diet consisted of bread , grains, pulses and fish sauces. This is where the food was kept warm for hours. Stone ovens, wheel grooves,functioning water, mosaic floors ceilings.
Being a port town, Pompeii was a thriving business town. The land was some of the most fertile in Italy and Europe. The excavated site is now about 9 kl from the port.This shows how far back the lava forced the sea. AS said earlier the last explosion was 1944. The volcano Vesuvius is still active today and takes 30 - 70 yrs roughly to erupt.Experts say it will explode again and the most notice anyone will be given is 3days max. They had a trial evacuation last year in Napoli . There are 600,000 people living in the area and the army said it will take 4-5 weeks to evacuate them.So its just another catastrophe waiting to happen.
So getting away from pizza etc, here is a wonderful idea for an afternoon snack with crisp croistini.
1 Camembert cheese (250 gramme)
2 Basil leaves
2-3 sun dried tomatoes
white wine
2 teaspoon pesto.
1 roisti pan
2 tsp Calvados
Cut Camembert in half length ways. Place one half in roisti pan. Finely shred basil leaves and sun dried tomatoes . Place in centre of cheese. Brush with basil pesto and pour some white wine onto cheese also. Place other Camembert on top. Lightly press down, and bake in the oven at 180 c for ten minutes. Remove from the oven and flambé with calvados. Eat with crisp croistini
So my next destination on my food travels was to be france , keen fan of molecular cooking ,
and Brillant Savarins "physiology of taste". So the opportunity has arisen to be representative for Ireland and the U.k, in the Paris food trip 2014 . So I said to my self why not give it a go . What motivation do you need to enter a competition of this calibre to go to Paris the home of cooking, the Eifle Tower and the Louvre. The chance to meet fellow food enthusiasts and taste the delicacies that Paris has to offer, and also the chance of meeting esteemed chefs and also the idea of a michelin star meal is appetizing also.
So come on vote for me to be your Irish and English representative in the Gourmandize food trip 2014.
You wont be dissapointed.
Tuesday 29 April 2014
Molecular Gastronomy. Food/Science or both.
Molecular Gastronomy . Food ,science or both ?
The application of science to
domestic and restaurant cooking has developed into the new science of molecular
gastronomy- the application of scientific principles to the understanding and
improvement of gastronomic food preparation Molecular gastronomy has been defined as a
field that attempts to link chemistry to culinary science, to explain
transformations that occur during cooking, and to improve culinary methods
through a better understanding of the underlying chemical composition of food.
The term was coined in the late 1980’s by the British physicist Nicholas Kurti
and the French food scientist and former journalist Herve This, who felt that
“empirical knowledge and tradition were as important in cooking as rational
understanding”. Information revealed through the practice of molecular
gastronomy research can be applied by cooks to improve their cooking, as it
explains various reasons why things happen when cooking- for instance, why a
souffle rises. Knowing this information can enable a cook to create optimum
conditions for the rising of a soufflé, based on the science behind the
transformation of the ingredients during cooking.
Nicholas
Kurti was a professor of physics at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford
University. An eminent scientist, best known for his work in low temperature
physics, in his latter years he turned much of his attention to organising
workshops and writing articles on food and cooking. Kurti had always had an
enthusiasm for cooking. During the Second World War, he would store his weekly
wartime ration of meat in the laboratory deep freeze until he had accumulated
enough to be able to invite his friends around for dinner. Kurti was famous for
the experiments he demonstrated in lectures, one of the most famous being to
the Royal Institute of Great Britain in 1969. he demonstrated the advantages of
using hypodermic syringes to put rum into mince pies., how a vacuum pump could
be used to make meringues and the benefits of monitoring the inside temperature
of a soufflé using a thermocouple.
‘Is it not quite amazing that today we know more about the temperature distribution in the atmosphere of the planet Venus than in the centre of our soufflé’?”
These meetings were founded by the late Nicholas Kurti following an initial suggestion from Elizabeth Thomas.
Molecular gastronomy’s form has
largely been determined by a series of meetings between chefs, scientists and
food writers held at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture in
Erice, Sicily over the course of the last 15- 20 years. These meetings were
founded by the late Nicholas Kurti following an initial suggestion from
Elizabeth Thomas.. The meetings on the
science of cooking were set in motion by Elizabeth, who had also studied at the London Cordon Bleu and ran a
cookery school in Berkeley, California. Her first husband was a physicist, and
she accompanied him to scientific conferences and counted many physicists as
friends.
Elizabeth attended a meeting in Erice.She was
a devoute advocate of low temperature cooking, as was Kurti. It is actually not
a new invention. The English scientist Benjamin Thompson described in the 18th
century how a joint of meat could be left in a drying oven over night and how
he was surprised when, next morning, the meat was found to be fully cooked and
very tender. Kurti repeated the experiment, leaving a 2kg lamb joint in an oven
at 80 degrees Celsius. After 8.5 hours, both the inside and outside temperature
of the lamb were around 75 and the meat was tender and juicy .
Together with the French chemist
Herve This, Nicholas Kurti felt that the gap between food science and cooking
at home and in restaurants was becoming too large. It was necessary to invent a
new discipline. He proposed “molecular gastronomy”, but Kurti, being a
physicist insisted that “and physical” should be added. “Molecular and physical
gastronomy”. After Kurti died, the files on the new discipline have simply
become known as molecular gastronomy.
Definitions of Molecular Gastronomy
Mmolecular gastronomy is an
emerging school of cooking that emphasises the science of cuisine- like
understanding why meat is best slow-cooked at 58° C”.
Molecular gastronomy has also
been defined as a field that ‘attempts to link chemistry to culinary science,
to explain transformations that occur during cooking and to improve culinary
methods through a better understanding of the underlying chemical composition
of food.’
Herve This defines molecular
gastronomy by distinguishing between cooking and gastronomy. “The first is the
preparation of food, whereas the latter is the knowledge of whatever concerns
mans nourishment. In essence, this does not concern food fashions or how to
prepare luxury food- such as tournedos Rossini, canard a l’orange or lobster
orientale- but rather an understanding of food; and for the more restricted,
“molecular gastronomy”, it is the chemistry and physics behind the preparation
of any dish; for example, why a mayonnaise becomes firm or why a soufflé
swells.”
Tthe application of science to
domestic and restaurant cooking has developed into the new science of molecular
gastronomy- the application of scientific principles to the understanding and
improvement of gastronomic food preparation.”
In 2008 Oxford University Press
describes molecular gastronomy as the art and practice of cooking using
scientific methods to create new or unusual dishes: Molecular gastronomy
combines science with the art of cooking.
In general, the field of
molecular gastronomy may be considered as that part of food science that
focuses on home and culinary eating changes and cooking phenomena.
It should be mentioned also that
chefs involved in experimental cuisine are not necessarily aware of the
scientific principles that support the new dishes that they are creating and
that the scientific approach of molecular gastronomy may help to provide
information that chefs can use to better understand the processes during the
creation of foods
Adoption and Repudiation of the Term
“Molecular Gastronomy”
In the late 1990’s and early
2000’s the term started to be used to describe a new style of cooking where
chefs were exploring novel possibilities in the kitchen by embracing science ,
technological advances in equipment and various natural gums and hydrocolloids
produced by the food processing industry. It has since been used to describe
the cooking of many famous chefs such as Pierre Gagniere, Ferran Adria, Heston
Blumenthal, Homaro Cantu and Grant Achatz. Adria is one chef amongst others who
has set up his own laboratory El Taller
in which to explore these possibilities.
Molecular cooking is also emerging
in restaurants like WD-50, The Fat Duck, El Bulli and Alinea, a style of
cooking that uses ingredients developed for industrial food production.
Molecular gastronomy meshes scientific research with cooking. The media have
sent shock waves throughout the globe, describing that the style is futuristic
and flashy
. Descriptions and photos of the
most eye catching dishes, most drastic techniques, and most outlandish new
textures have spread through industry rags, and eventually into magazines and
television, leaving us with a skewed understanding.
In 2005, the Institute for
Advanced Studies on Flavour, Gastronomy and Culinary Arts was formed in Reims , France ,
to promote gastronomy and molecular gastronomy. Universities in many countries,
such as the Netherlands, Argentine and Denmark have set up professorships in
this discipline. He further asserts that despite this knowledge and interest,
mistakes are still being made. In 2002, the media described some chefs as
“molecular gastronomists” which is obviously wrong because chefs create food
and not knowledge. The confusion was caused in part by the scientific programme
which included technological applications and education. Nicholas Kurti and
Herve This agreed that molecular gastronomy was science so they excluded the
educational and technological elements.
Scientists preferred appellation
for this new culinary style is not favoured everywhere and French Laundry chef
Thomas Keller said that molecular gastronomy is a label coined by the media. He
prefers to call it contemporary cuisine. ‘I
think it’s an unfortunate term’, ‘It doesn’t really describe accurately what
people are doing or what their approach is. A lot of people doing cooking of
that type don’t like to be associated with that term’. ‘These chefs are
right’ ‘They do not do molecular
gastronomy because molecular gastronomy is science not cooking. Some can apply
the results of molecular gastronomy; some just change the ingredients, methods
or tools, and its only modernisation of culinary techniques’.
Ferran Adria cites “…The biggest lie out there in terms of cooking” ‘The
world of food has changed a great deal in modern times. Change has come fast
over the last decade. Along with many other developments, a new approach to
cooking has emerged in restaurants around the globe, including our own. We feel
that this approach has been widely misunderstood, both inside and outside our
profession. Certain aspects of it are over emphasised and sensationalised,
while others are being ignored. We believe that this is an important time in
cooking, and wish to clarify the principles
and thoughts that actually guide us’.
Adria further added that ‘the disciplines of food chemistry and food
technology are valuable sources of information and ideas for all cooks. Even
the most straightforward traditional preparation can be strengthened by the
understanding of its ingredients and methods, and chemists have been helping
cooks for hundreds of years. The fashionable term “molecular gastronomy” was
introduced relatively recently, in 1992, to name a particular academic workshop
for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes.
That workshop did not influence our approach, and the term “molecular
gastronomy” does not describe our cooking or indeed any style of cooking’.
Misapplication of term ‘molecular gastronomy’
The term molecular gastronomy has
been used in the culinary arts and in particular by the media and journalists
to describe a cooking style adopted by some chefs that is characterised by its
reliance on principles, techniques and practices superficially associated with
the sciences and with food technology as applied within the industry.
The phrase is often misused by
the media to refer to chefs who apply techniques developed by scientists to
their own style of cooking. Although a confusion of terminology, the link of
molecular gastronomy with the practice of cooking follows the natural progression
of bench research to practical applications that This and Kurti foresaw when
they proposed the new discipline The innovations of Nouvelle Cuisine in the
1970’s found their place in evolution in culinary arts such as techniques like
hot gels, unusual starches- without being dogged by the ungainly and inaccurate
term molecular gastronomy. ‘It is the new
cuisine but we stopped referring to Nouvelle Cuisine as that’.
Confusion with the Term molecular gastronomy
There is a real concern within
the culinary community as to whether the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ should be
redefined or not. Gastronomy is the study of the relationship between food and
culture and molecular gastronomy does not really cover these elements. ‘Molecular’
in molecular gastronomy has a definition similar to that as it does in
molecular biology. The similarity is intentional because physics and chemistry
are at the centre of this discipline the
term creates artificial barriers. “Molecular
makes it sound very complicated and gastronomy makes it sound elitist”. A differentiation should be
made between cooking and gastronomy. Cooking means preparing dishes and
gastronomy, according to the promoter of the word (Brillat Savarin), means
intelligent knowledge of whatever concerns mans nourishment. When it comes to
the study of chemical and physical transformations involved in cooking, then
the term molecular gastronomy applies. Why not “molecular cooking”?.
Cooking is a craft, an art–not a science.When
food is presented as if it is science or invokes images of it being created in
a laboratory, diners tend to get nervous. ‘I think the problem with the term
“molecular gastronomy” is that it implies teeny-tiny portions of the
unfamiliar, and in America (and many other cultures around the world), we have
been taught to believe that the definition of good dining or a good meal is
that which makes you full. Reminded of the days when chefs identified with
“nouvelle cuisine” began to get annoyed when the label was applied to their
style; and arguments followed about the meaning of the term and how it did or
did not apply to one or another. The philosophical conceits of nouvelle cuisine
were so radical at changing the appearance of haute cuisine and the
socioeconomic context for its adoption were long lasting, that a lot more than
the name would have to change for it to go for good.
Objectives of Molecular Gastronomy
Objectives for molecular
gastronomy as reformed by Herve This which are to explore scientifically: (a)
the artistic component of cooking, (b) the technical component of cooking, i.e.
the science behind recipes (applying the concepts of precisions, referring to
details in a recipe, and definitions referring to main points in a recipe, (c)
the social component of cooking.
A subject which is concerned with the whole process of the preparation of food, from raw ingredients to the actual dish on the plate. Molecular Gastronomy encompasses such diverse issues as:
- How and why we evolved our particular taste
and flavour sense organs and our general food likes and dislikes?
- How do production methods affect the eventual
flavour and texture of food ingredients?
- How are these ingredients changed by different
cooking methods?
- Can we devise new cooking methods that produce
unusual and improved results of texture and flavour?
- How do our brains actually interpret the
signals from all our senses to tell us the “flavour” of food?
- How is our enjoyment of food affected by other
influences such as the environment in which we eat the food, our mood,
etc?
Initially molecular gastronomy
had five aims: (a) to collect and investigate old wives tales about cooking;
(b) to model and examine recipes; (c) to introduce new tools; (d) to invent new
dishes using knowledge from previous three aims; (e) and to use the appeal of
food to market science. Today it is easy to see that this scientific module was
misleading and had failures. The
initial objectives were a major mistake because introducing new tools and
inventing new dishes are technological, not scientific and to use the appeal of
food to promote science is political.Tthe scientific programme became clearer
when reduced to two aims which are to model definitions and to collect and
scrutinise culinary precisions; however, this was soon found insufficient
because the main aim in cooking is to produce food, which is art and not
techniques.
Another objective for the
molecular gastronomy community is ensuring that developments in food
preparation at the gastronomic level filter down into the domestic arena, where
it is compared to the effect of the Grand Prix racing on the motor industry. It
is also believed that developments in top restaurants, such as new cooking
methods, and healthier dishes will filter into the general food industry
Examples of Molecular Gastronomy in Culinary
Arts.
Recipes are the most important
written form of culinary knowledge, and they traditionally consist of a
definition: for example, a soufflé is a foamy product that swells during
cooking, and crumples once someone pokes a knife or fork into it; or a
mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil in an egg yolk, pepper, salt and vinegar. In
general these definitions are usually mixed with methods and materials.
Answering questions can correct a mistake, using knowledge to improve the cooking
process or even invent new dishes. One example of how physics and chemistry can
lead to new ways of cooking is provided by an egg. If an egg is heated, water
evaporates, the proteins denature and polymerise to enclose water and the end
result is a cooked egg. An alternative way to do this is to use alcohol because
it denatures proteins so the same result is achieved by adding liquor to a raw
egg. Similarly the scientific proven way to obtain an airy soufflé is to heat
it from below, so evaporation of water pushes the contents upwards. That is
simple physics but it can help us to make better food.
By sampling molecules and
learning the chemical connections between them, Heston Blumenthal went off on
the creative journey of flavour pairings. White chocolate and caviar, foie gras
and jasmine, asparagus and licorice which all have molecular commonalities that
keep them from clashing and when properly paired can lead to eclectic new
tastes. Food scientists know that red cabbage and mustard contain mustard oil,
but it was Blumenthal who introduced us to Pommery-mustard ice cream in
red-cabbage gazpacho. According to Blumenthal, another amazing discovery was
made in the centre for food science in the Netherlands and involved our sense
of smell and how we all taste foods slightly differently.
Herve This came up with a formal system of
classification for what happens when foods are mixed, baked, fried, sautéed in
lime juice etc; it shows, for example, how the 451 classical French sauces
divide down into 23 distinct types. More importantly the system allows the
creation and pairing of large numbers of novel and potentially tasty dishes by
generating a formula describing the physical microstructure of a previously
nonexistent dish, he then collaborated with Pierre Gagnaire to contribute real
ingredients resulting in a bitter orange, scallop, and smoked tea dish that
delighted Gagnaires .
Examples of new food creations
from the famous El Bulli in Spain which include shiny green olives served on a
spoon, to be eaten in one bite, but it isn’t an olive at all. The gushing
sphere bursts into a mouthful of intense olive juices. Golden eggs encased in
delicate caramel dissolve and release a mouthful of tangerine bloom essence,
which attack the senses. Other foods from El Bulli are plump mussels wrapped in
a seawater jelly, served with tiny cubes of apple and finished with an intense
consommé of potatoes and ham; a dessert beautifully crafted in hummingbird
shape which is draped across a plate, its long beak is formed from caramel, and
the head is filled with sweet liquid sesame. One cracks the head and the
contents spill over fruit sorbets, ice creams and jellies that form its body
and wings. These examples are good practical ones of a successful interplay
between science and gastronomy, where art and science are systematically
blended together.
New dishes have been named after
famous Chemists by the molecular gastronomy workshop. They have been produced
on the basis of results of molecular gastronomy. Examples include Gibbs, which is where an egg white is
whipped with oil and a white emulsion obtained; Vauquelin, a foam resulting from egg white and added orange juice;
and Baume a coagulated egg that has
been left in alcohol for a month .
Molecular Mixology
Chemistry is not a word that is
associated with cocktails.More bartenders are applying the science of molecular
gastronomy in the search for an improved drink, for example mixing alcohol with
liquid nitrogen, chlorides and alginates. The result: a Mojito mist to be
sprayed instead of being sipped, a Hurricane that erupts like a school science
experiment and whiskey marshmallows. The name is a twist on molecular gastronomy, a
term for the application of scientific principles to cooking. Many chefs and
bartenders complained that ‘molecular mixology’ is not a fully accurate
designation for a trend that is less about molecular science and more about
techniques that chefs are discovering in their kitchens.The chemical cocktail
movement grew from a symposium sponsored by Dutch distiller Bols in 2005.
Proponents of Molecular Gastronomy
‘As science has gradually percolated into the world of cooking, cooking
has been drawn into the world of academic and industrial science’. One very
effective force behind this movement was Nicholas Kurti, a physicist and food
lover at the University
of Oxford as previously
mentioned. At the age of 84, in 1992 Kurti nudged civilisation along by
organising the International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy at
Erice, Sicily, where professional cooks and scientists worked together for the
first time to advance gastronomy, and the making and appreciation of foods to
the highest quality. .
Harold McGee is a freelance
writer based in California .
His writing about the science of food and cooking since 1979 has been a huge
influence on molecular gastronomy enthusiasts such as Heston Blumenthal. ‘Harold McGee’s book was the single biggest
catalyst of the path that I am following now’, Blumenthal says. McGee is a
living library of food science and basic science books and magazines and
modestly describes his work as gathering the information that’s relevant to
restaurants and home cooks and translating that information into plain English
for those cooks. In addition to the book “On
Food and Cooking” he has also published The
Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science
and Lore .
Several highly regarded chefs,
the most famous being Heston Blumenthal in England and Ferran Adria in Spain,
experiment with industrial and laboratory tools – gelling agents from seaweeds
and bacteria, non sweet sugars, pressurised gases and liquid nitrogen to bring
new forms of pleasure to the table..
In contrast to the Slow Food
movement, molecular gastronomy employs modern scientific processes and Ferran
Adria is largely responsible for the direction the movement has. Adria has a
laboratory in Barcelona called El Taller
that works on new creations and markets bright and new ideas to trendy hotel
chains and food processors. He sells a range of stainless steel cutlery called
‘Faces’ and metal tableware, called ‘Snack’, inspired by Frank Gehry, the
architect of the Guggenheim Art Museum in Bilbao. Adria argued that traditional
cooking did not bring out the full flavours and textures of their natural
ingredients, of which Spain
has in abundance. Adria has set about deconstructing dishes such as tortilla
and presenting the Spanish omelette as individually delicious parts of the sum,
rather than a tasty sum of the parts.
Heston Blumenthal’s career has
taken some remarkable turns. He is the winner of the 2004 Catey Chef Award and
this book taught chef has been awarded three Michelin stars at The Fat Duck Restaurant. Ferran Adria
described Blumenthal as “the future” while introducing him at the Madrid Fusion
Gastro Summit, and two months later he was named winner of the Gourmand World
Cookbook Awards 2003. Currently Blumenthal is involved with Charles Spence of Oxford University
doing work combining menthol and chilli. He is also working on developing
pastilles with liquid centres at Nottingham
University alongside Tony Blake who is
a professor in the School
of Biosciences and has
been interested in food and cooking since he was a child.
Blumenthal has certainly built up
an amazing alliance of like minded people including leading scientists. While
he is willing to share his knowledge and spread the word on molecular
gastronomy he laments the fact that there are still individuals, namely British
journalists, dragging their feet..
Critiques
of Molecular Gastronomy
Molecular
gastronomy seems to be more of a fad, like most trends, rather than a
revolution. From the beginning, some critics have scorned a way of cooking that
relies too heavily on technology and often chooses form over substance.
Joseph Maria Fonalleras, a
prominent writer and columnist said Ferran Adria has gone over the top, ‘ talking about dishes as if he were
discussing mathematics rather than cooking. Those who watch how Ferran Adria
uses a screwdriver to uncoil a thread of sugar to make it into a ring will
split their sides with laughter’.
People will be convinced that the nueva cocina has gone too far. Adria has also
been criticised by Santi Santamaria, a culinary traditionalist, who has three
Michelin stars for his restaurant Can Fabes. Kingstone, Santamaria takes aim at Ardria and his
disciples in his new book The Kitchen
Laid Bare for their use of synthetic additives- gels, thickening agents and
preservatives at the expense of locally produced ingredients. ‘I believe the interference of industry in
haute cuisine has reached new levels, in part because of your work’ writes
Sanatmaria in an open letter to Adria. Adria’s goal is to increase sensuality through taste, sight
and texture as well as originality. Like any skilled artist, his focus is on
originality and the authentic, of whatever type of food is being created. Nutritionists
agree, pointing out that the additives used to create El Bulli’s trademark
foams and airs have all been approved by the European Union, and that there is
no health issue as one would have to consume large amounts to have an adverse
reaction. Adria argues ‘that when Santamaria talks about industrial products, bear in mind that sugar is an industrial product, as is the best wine in
the world; its crazy to suggest that these additives are the biggest health
issue of our time; there are thousands of problems in day to day nutrition,
which are much more important than the fact that a handful of chefs are doing
something a bit different’. By
feeding the hunger for novel, bigger than life flavours, Adria is encouraging a
type of techni-colour food spectrum much beyond nature’s scope. No cooking is
natural, but as trend-setting chefs and food processing keep widening the gap
between raw ingredients and the finished dish, the consumer’s ability and
desire to create tempting food at home continues to atrophy. ‘Slow
foodies, have no fear. No one will be making foams in forty years, but plenty
of people will be enjoying fresh local mushrooms, simply sautéed’.
Fredy Girardet, a retired Swiss
chef who critiques avant garde cooking techniques cites ‘we need to finish with these mish-mashed, sweet tasting avant garde
dishes, where nothing is identifiable, neither texture, nor freshness, nor the
original taste of the product’. He also thinks that this type of culinary
experimentation does not bode well for the future of haute cuisine if young
chefs take this path as their model.
Marco Pierre White has also hit
out at the concept of molecular gastronomy, claiming the style is all about
attracting column inches. Speaking at Caterers Chef Conference he says of the scientific
approach to cooking ‘I just don’t get it,
what does it mean? Does it make food taste any better?’ (Harmer 2008).
The meat and potato enthusiasts
who dominate the dining scene remain sceptical and dining competition is
fierce. Those chefs involved in molecular gastronomy are indeed setting
themselves apart from the community. The question is whether their mixing of
haute cuisine and science will stand the test of time . Innovation should be
embraced but putting your menu so far out on the edge of reasonable tastes
makes it very prone to falling of the precipice completely.
Fundamentally, however, both
sides claim to be in pursuit of a certain purity and even authenticity
Molecular Gastronomy- Art, Science or Both?
Nico Landenis unequivocally
declares his deep conviction that cooking is a science and presentation is an
art. The well known food critic, Luca Vercelloni, says: ‘cooking is very different from art…Recipes are not masterpieces to be
exhibited in galleries…Chefs must be above all skilful executors’, rather than
inspired creators’ (Arouh, 2005).
The synergy between cooking and
science is dependent on sensible integration of the two disciplines. Home cooks
are about to learn what McDonalds and Kraft foods have known for more than
fifty years: placing food over heat is science and not art. The resistance to
food science has grown stronger with the local, organic and slow food movements
of late. Ironically, such gastronomic science has reached its apogee at the
same time as its near opposite, the preservationist Slow Food movement, which
seeks to preserve old traditions and methods of cooking. Each culinary movement
is reacting to the mass food culture: One rejects industrial food in favour of
authenticity; the other uses industrial food processing techniques to create
the rare realm of haute cuisine.
Is molecular gastronomy the same as
“culinology”? Clearly there is knowledge behind the enterprise of culinology
but as well as knowledge there is money and communication. Documents issued by
Universities that teach Culinology indicate that it involves some elements
which allow chefs to cook differently and therefore culinology is cooking and
not molecular gastronomy. The latter must be considered a scientific discipline
because it is about understanding and knowledge (looking for mechanisms and
establishing modes of operation). Thanks
to science, which teaches us that an egg yolk deserves to be the object of
curiosity and admiration, we have no need to be bored in a kitchen. Molecular
gastronomy he adds does not aim solely at attaining pure knowledge, as it seeks
also to give practical knowledge a sound foundation by explaining why
successful recipes work and why some mistakes happen. For example, if one
enquires why lumps occur when flour is placed in a hot liquid, you will be led
to useful conclusions that will allow certain culinary practices to be refined.
One does not have to be a scientist to be a
great chef, the latest food trends in restaurants such as El Bulli is all about
food as theatre rather than food as just food. Adria, states that he has never
ascribed any scientific origin to his creations, they have come about from a
purely culinary quest: observation and curiosity have been part and parcel of
his activity. For example, in 1998 when it was discovered that agar-agar could
withstand high temperatures, hot jellies were created based on nothing but
observation.
Adria, says ‘I think what we have here is a marketing operation and the public
should not be tricked into believing that molecular cuisine is a cooking
style’.’ To cook well, we must learn (its history, techniques, products, tradition
and innovation, culinary processes, etc.). Then, think, discuss, try out,
reflect, choose…And then constantly question anything we assume is true’.’ And
if in the meantime we need to resort to science or history books or any other
creative discipline, at least we shall acquire new information to reinforce our
culinary philosophy’. Bl ‘Tradition
is the base which all cooks who aspire to excellence must know and master, our
open approach builds upon the best that tradition has to offer’. As to the methods they employ, ‘It is all just cooking’. ‘We do not pursue novelty for its own sake,
We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen and
other non traditional methods but these do not define our cooking’. Blumenthal highlights that
they are a few of the many tools that they are fortunate to have available as
they strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.
Blumenthal
offers that eating engages all the senses as well as the mind and that
preparing and serving food could possibly be the most complex of the performing
arts
‘science
looks for mechanisms of phenomena, whereas technology is using scientific
results to enhance a technique or a craft. As all recipes are composed of three
parts (the technically useless details, the definitions, and the culinary exact
measurements), molecular gastronomy should study all these parts, but only from
a scientific point of view’.
Gap between Science and Culinary Arts
The manufacturing food industry
has recently welcomed chefs into the business causing more than a few fireworks
in the product development laboratories as creativity clashes against the
disciplined application of scientific principles. Chefs bring a unique
viewpoint to the food industry as they do not see the food through analytical
or scientific eyes. They are creative and artistic individuals. While
scientists can give benefits to cooks, the relationship is also reciprocal-
scientists can gain from the skills, knowledge and innovation of chefs. They
are continuously contributing with new ideas, some of which are very
interesting and motivating from an industrial point of view. Chefs working with
scientists give the chefs opportunities that are rarely possible without this
collaboration, for example, access to processing equipment and analytical
device; further suggesting that it is important for chefs to develop a
scientific way of thinking, i.e. a generic approach to problems rather than an
approach very specific to a particular meaning. Many chefs fail to realise the
complexity of product development for products to be sold in retail stores, as
opposed to food service dishes. Corporate chefs will need to know how to scale
up products they develop for manufacturing and what guidelines will make the
food a success and be cost effective.
The intersection of molecular
gastronomy and the culinary arts is a natural meeting place of the two
cultures: scientific rationalism and the creative arts. Few of the general
public understand the scientific composition of food. However, scientists are
well placed to communicate such knowledge to society. By capitalising upon the
potential for the general public to listen to chefs, a bridge may be developed
to educate people about a healthier and improved manner of eating based on. With
experts from different disciplines such as history, culture, and industrial
design etc, are essential for progress in cooking, in particular collaboration
with the food industry and scientists which have already brought about
fundamental advances. ‘Sharing this
knowledge among cooking professionals has contributed to this evolution’.
Ferran Adria’s collaboration with
scientist and gourmet Pere Castells, resulted in the setting up of The Alicia
Foundation and so managed to exchange ideas and build up work structure. One
specific result of this partnership was the publication of a Scientific and
Gastronomic Lexicon, a tool designed to bridge the gap between cooking and
science.
Future of Molecular Gastronomy
‘What is the future of food once
we start to explore it scientifically’? ‘The
difficultly with the future is that it is hard to predict,. We should avoid
making the same mistakes that French chemist Marcellin Berthelot made about a
century ago; he predicted that the success of organic chemistry would allow us
to abandon traditional food and by the year 2000, eat nutritive tablets
instead. He was obviously wrong as humans are living organisms, with an
extremely sophisticated sensory apparatus that has evolved over millions of
years to detect odour, taste, consistency, temperature and more’
It seems that collaborations with
chefs are vital. The advantages for the chefs are clear: new dishes, new ways
of preparing existing dishes, new techniques. ‘For the chef, new horizons open through the understanding of some
physics, chemistry and the psychology of food’
The American culinary scene,
Sarkar and Cantu unequivocally predict that within ten years, half the
restaurants in the United States will offer that type of cuisine, and chefs
that are not adopting it will be left behind. What they agree on, however, is
that molecular gastronomy will not enter the domestic arena, under any label,
anytime soon. Professor This says that certain facts that come out of his
experiments, such as being able to make a chocolate mousse without using egg
whites or that the temperature of the eggs and the oil does not matter when
making mayonnaise, could save cooks time and/or money and might transfer into
home kitchens, but not on a large scale. Lack of special equipment, such as
emersion circulators, dehydrators and carbonators impede home cooks.
Nowaday’s we are just beginning
to realise the important roles all our senses play in affecting the ways in
which our brains interpret flavour. But we have a great deal to learn before we
fully understand the complexities of how we taste food and perceive and
appreciate flavour and texture. This journey of discovery which is the new
science of molecular gastronomy will be a stimulating and exciting one. In
Chicago, Homaro Cantu’s technological explorations at his laboratory, “Moto”
have attracted the attention of NASA
with whom Cantu now has a contract for space ready food.
New technologies leave their mark
on another sphere, which will play a main role in the future. Flavours and
odours are synthesised in laboratories for example, Swiss perfume giant
Givaudan, is contributing to the elaboration of more than 20 thousand
artificial odours (300 strawberry only), and biologists from the multinational
company organised a trip to the Madagascar forests in search of molecules from
which new aromas could be obtained.
Technologies such as microwave
ovens were developed due to research in food technology at American space
agency (NASA). The immediate task is to
make products stay fresher for longer- “products, which can be kept for months
without losing their nutritional properties and vitamin quality”, claims
Michele Perchonok from NASA. Techniques that are used include pulsing electric
fields, and high frequency sterilisation. A sandwich prepared in this way has
turned out to be edible in seven years. The results can be useful for a mission
to Mars although it seems nobody has tasted the sandwich yet .
Other molecular gastronomists
make the future seem exciting, especially if we can control food production
through better chemistry. The “meaning” of food seems now to be reduced to its
molecules, without adequate attention to the possible emergent properties that
may be produced. Charles Spence cites that the future of gastronomy has great
potential; to date; many of the advances in food design have come from a trial
and error approach.
The future seems to promise many new advances
in the design and preparation of foods that are based on a better understanding
of how the brain works. Any better understanding of how the brain puts together
what it sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels, can help us design novel food
experiences that more effectively stimulate the senses. McGee, (2004) adds that
new emphasis now is on flavours and on some particular molecules which create
flavour.
Prediction
of Molecular Gastronomy for the Domestic Arena
Fewer people actually do cooking-
because of prepared dishes at supermarkets, meal preparation kitchens and
restaurants will become even cheaper- the remaining brave cooks are going a
little science mad. This paradigm shift will not be such a big deal in practice
as for example an oven is very much an advanced science gadget and people use
meat thermometers. Practices will step up a little by replacing liquid
measuring cups with more accurate dry weight scales; vacuum sealer and a Crock
pot that stays at precise temperatures will enable cooks to sous vide meat
(which is cooking in a bag for a short time at high temperatures); cooks can
learn how to use agar-agar and xanthan gum (just better versions of gelatine
and cornflour, really); and a review of some high school chemistry will also be
useful.
Conclusion
Molecular gastronomy is still
relatively new, constantly changing and subject to misinterpretations in the
media and lacking a clear definition. However, in summary molecular can be
summarised as a discipline involving the study of physical and chemical
processes that happen in cooking. It investigates the mechanisms behind the
transformation of ingredients and investigates the artistic, social and
technical aspects of culinary phenomena in general.
Why choose me. ?
I am a food enthusiast and innovator with numerous accolades and awards.As you can guess I am also a molecular gastronomy enthusiast. The blog I composed gives people the option to decide for them selves what exactly molecular gastronomy is or isn't. For me personally I have taken molecular gastronomy to be both a food discipline and a science.
So to back up my opinion I have taken a truly Traditional Irish dish and have reconstructed in a molecular fashion using the new ingredients and techniques available at my disposal.
The dish. " Boiled bacon and Cabbage with parsley sauce.
The reconstruction involves the use of iso whippers, waterbath for precision cooking, hand blender for airs, emulsions created using agar agar , cabbage juice and olive oil. Also potato Gnocchi cooked in an alginate bath. The dish is to demonstrate by embracing new Phenomenons like "Molecular Gastronomy" that we can explore and do almost anything we want with old dishes(by transforming them into new creations)with the aid of the equipment, techniques and ingredients at our disposal.
The opportunity to meet professionals of different gastronomic fields, to savour the delights and traditional cuisine served in different ways. To promote Ireland in a Molecular Gastronomique way . To try and promote the fact that we are not miles apart from the elite when it comes to Gastronomy and Molecular Gastronomy.
And most of all to show that "molecular gastronomy" and new phenomenons alike should be embraced rather than shunned.
"The future of our generations relies solely on what we feed our children"
Why choose me. ?
I am a food enthusiast and innovator with numerous accolades and awards.As you can guess I am also a molecular gastronomy enthusiast. The blog I composed gives people the option to decide for them selves what exactly molecular gastronomy is or isn't. For me personally I have taken molecular gastronomy to be both a food discipline and a science.
So to back up my opinion I have taken a truly Traditional Irish dish and have reconstructed in a molecular fashion using the new ingredients and techniques available at my disposal.
The dish. " Boiled bacon and Cabbage with parsley sauce.
The reconstruction involves the use of iso whippers, waterbath for precision cooking, hand blender for airs, emulsions created using agar agar , cabbage juice and olive oil. Also potato Gnocchi cooked in an alginate bath. The dish is to demonstrate by embracing new Phenomenons like "Molecular Gastronomy" that we can explore and do almost anything we want with old dishes(by transforming them into new creations)with the aid of the equipment, techniques and ingredients at our disposal.
The opportunity to meet professionals of different gastronomic fields, to savour the delights and traditional cuisine served in different ways. To promote Ireland in a Molecular Gastronomique way . To try and promote the fact that we are not miles apart from the elite when it comes to Gastronomy and Molecular Gastronomy.
And most of all to show that "molecular gastronomy" and new phenomenons alike should be embraced rather than shunned.
"The future of our generations relies solely on what we feed our children"
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