Alinea is not a restaurant, it’s an experience that involves eating. Search it. The MIT Tech Review has posted a seven minute video featuring Grant Achatz, the chef at Alinea, and his vision for the restaurant. According to Corby Kumer, an editor and food critic with The Atlantic Monthly, and also in the video, Achatz has used molecular gastronomy to challenge the perceptions of his guests. See the video…

Great summer workshops are one of the perks of academia. Some of these workshops become the gathering place for the influentials of a field. The workshops at Cold Spring Harbor defined DNA science. So it is with the workshop on molecular gastronomy at Erice. This small medieval village in Sicily is the home of the Ettore Majorana Centre, which hosted the first meeting on molecular gastronomy. Organized then by Nicholas Kurti and today by Hervé This, the workshop bring together the who’s who of the field every two to three years.…

Besides the the six tastes (it’s six because of fat, see a previous post), we also have other sensations in our mouth. We can sense when something is spicy hot, as when food has cayenne or wasabi, and when it has a chemical coolant, such as the menthol in chewing gum. These sensations are different from tastes because they rely on little (molecular little) tubes on the nerve cells. They are not in our taste buds but in our mouth and throat.…

Words cost so little (0.2 cents per spoken word, I estimate). But one cannot throw taste, aroma, and flavor around. Taste comes from the sensations one gets through our taste buds in our mouth. Aroma through our nose. And flavor is the combination of aroma, taste and other sensations we get from food when we eat. There are also mechanical sensations. These include the texture, the crunchiness, the slipperiness of food, what we call mouth feel.…

Our sense of taste is not very refined. Not as refined as our sense of smell. But mess up the taste of your dish and the flavor is gone. In trying to get the flavor right, one has to start from the taste. Getting a dish to taste good requires craft, but to ruin it, just make it bitter. Just like we are born liking sweet, we instinctively dislike bitter tastes.…