Ted Russin...CP Kelco...food science

Edible beads.

"Food science can be yummy"

Ted Russin helps top chefs stay at (and sharpen) the cutting edge of what's possible in food

by

Betty Hallock

April 29th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

"It's like being a choreographer. You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."-- Ted Russin.

A low-slung, '50s-era office complex in the middle of a commercial park in San Diego doesn't look much like a hotbed of progressive cuisine. But here in Food Lab 1 at a company called CP Kelco, food scientist Ted Russin is doing his part to spark the imaginations of chefs.

Russin started working at CP Kelco in early 2006. The company makes hydrocolloids such as pectin, carrageenan, gellan gum, cellulose gum and xanthan gum--substances that can thicken liquids or turn them into gels. They hold a special interest fo chefs looking to present familiar flavors in new forms and are the crux of cutting-edge cooking. These items are staples in many high-end chefs' repertoires, whether they want to tie foie gras into knots or make smoother, silkier sauces.

But encapsulating liquid in a gel exterior (like the Ferran Adria olives at the Bazaar in Beverly Hills) or making sure the gellan coating for one's fish has a desirable texture requires understanding some of the science behind these ingredients."It's like being a choreographer," says Russin, who has studied ballet. "You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."

Russin, 34, wears a white lab coat; two Sharpies and a digital timer are tucked in his pocket. He looks boyish and wears glasses, and the crown of his brown hair is styled into a short peak that intimates irreverence (after all, he was a member of a metal band called Shrifft and has on at least one occasion taken his two-wheel-drive Neon off-roading in the desert east of San Diego). He has a bachelor's in philosophy, a cooking certificate (he was briefly chef de partie at a French restaurant in Winnipeg, Canada) and a master's in food science and agricultural chemistry.

Chefs such as Thomas Keller and Corey Lee of the French Laundry and Kyle Connaughton, research chef at the Fat Duck, have tapped Russin to help hammer out ideas or perfect methods .

Most of CP Kelco's business is with major food manufacturing companies that make sauces by the vat, but Russin says working directly with high-end chefs gives him a chance to bridge the gap between the culinary arts and food science -- "to straddle the divide between these two related yet somewhat distant disciplines and create new food ideas from this collaboration."

The '50s and '60s were the golden age of food science, Russin says. "Frozen dinners were a huge leap." Another big innovation in food was laminated packaging, he says. "And Cool Whip is extraordinary," from a food science perspective. Who knows whether chefs deep-frying mayonnaise and making drinks that are simultaneously hot and cold could spur the next transcendent leap?

"I'm assuming this is kind of how haute couture works," Russin says. What starts in cutting-edge restaurants may inspire what ends up in the aisles of the supermarket. "I'm somewhere in the middle. It's a very exciting place to be."

"When we first started carrying this stuff, everybody thought we were crazy," says Fany Setiyo, a sales representative for Le Sanctuaire, a supplier of ingredients to chefs. Le Sanctuaire (which has a San Francisco showroom and online store) now carries about 30 hydrocolloids from various producers.

Russin talks about desserts as "systems" and discusses cooking in terms of heuristic techniques but also has the ability to convey complicated concepts. "Sometimes he'll go off on something, and I'll say, 'Ted, break it down to me in 10 words or less,' and he does," says Adrian Vasquez, pastry chef at Providence. "Ted, in my book, is a genius."

Russin formulates salad dressings and comes up with products such as a foam for coffee that can be squirted out of a can and a self-layering dessert for which CP Kelco has submitted a patent application. "What is possible?" he says. "That's where the conversation begins."

"Food scientist works alongside chefs to dream up new ideas"

CP Kelco's Ted Russin in San Diego straddles the divide between food science and culinary arts, bringing the cutting edge to the dining table

by

Betty Hallock

April 1st, 2009

Los Angeles Times

A low-slung, '50s-era office complex in the middle of a commercial park in San Diego doesn't look much like a hotbed of progressive cuisine.

But here in Food Lab 1 at a company called CP Kelco, food scientist Ted Russin is doing his part to spark the imaginations of chefs.

Russin is holding a blowtorch to a disk of what looks like lemon-yellow Jell-O, except that it's made with gellan gum instead of gelatin. He keeps blasting away at it, in the interest of demonstrating its heat-resistant properties (gellan gum is produced by bacteria discovered on a lily pad in Pennsylvania in the 1970s).

"If you've ever blowtorched gelatin, it's a horrible, horrible thing," he says. But the gel in his pan looks generally unfazed; the sugar is starting to caramelize, but the disk is otherwise holding its shape.

FOR THE RECORD:

Rancho Bernardo Inn: In Wednesday's Food section, an article about a food scientist at CP Kelco stated that Rancho Bernardo Inn is in Escondido. The resort is in San Diego. -


"It can withstand deep-frying. You can serve warm gelées," he says. Or, as Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal uses it, you can make sorbet and ice cream that don't immediately melt when flambéed.

That's the magic of hydrocolloids, substances that can thicken liquids or turn them into gels. They hold a special interest for chefs who are looking for ways to present familiar flavors in new forms, the crux of cutting-edge cooking. CP Kelco makes hydrocolloids such as pectin, carrageenan, gellan gum, cellulose gum and xanthan gum. "Our expertise is texture modification, anywhere where you need to control water," Russin says. "There's a lot of water in food, a heck of a lot of water."

Familiar pantry items such as starch and gelatin are hydrocolloids, as are agar and pectin.

Keeping it together

Hydrocolloids are what prevent bottled salad dressings from separating into water and oil. And they're staples in many high-end chefs' repertoires, whether they want to tie foie gras into knots or make smoother, silkier sauces.

But encapsulating liquid in a gel exterior or making sure the gellan coating for one's fish has a desirable texture requires understanding some of the science behind these ingredients.

"It's like being a choreographer," says Russin, who has studied ballet. "You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."

Chefs such as Thomas Keller and Corey Lee of the French Laundry and Kyle Connaughton, research chef at the Fat Duck, have tapped Russin to help hammer out ideas, perfect methods or discuss the science of cooking in general. "He has been a great resource for us in understanding these ingredients," says Lee, who has visited the lab in San Diego. "He has worked on several experiments with us so it's not just trial and error. There's an approach to ingredients where we're not just throwing darts here."

In Keller's latest book, "Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide," gellan gum is an ingredient in a recipe for a mango "yolk," a sphere that has a gel exterior surrounding mango juice. He credits CP Kelco with helping to develop the recipe, which involves dropping spoonfuls of mango juice mixed with gellan gum and sodium hexametaphosphate (used to keep the mixture from setting right away) into a bath of water containing calcium gluconate, which sets the gel.

This is the technique behind Ferran Adria's "liquid olives," though he uses different hydrocolloids.

Most of CP Kelco's business is with major food manufacturing companies that make sauces by the vat, but Russin says working directly with high-end chefs gives him a chance to bridge the gap between the culinary arts and food science -- "to straddle the divide between these two related yet somewhat distant disciplines and create new food ideas from this collaboration."

The '50s and '60s were the golden age of food science, Russin says. "Frozen dinners were a huge leap." Another big innovation in food was laminated packaging, he says. "And Cool Whip is extraordinary," from a food science perspective. Who knows whether chefs deep-frying mayonnaise and making drinks that are simultaneously hot and cold could spur the next transcendent leap?

"I'm assuming this is kind of how haute couture works," Russin says. What starts in cutting-edge restaurants may inspire what ends up in the aisles of the supermarket. "I'm somewhere in the middle. It's a very exciting place to be."

Russin, 34, wears a knee-length white lab coat; two Sharpies and a digital timer are tucked into his pocket. He looks boyish and wears glasses, and the crown of his brown hair is styled into a short peak that intimates irreverence (after all, he was a member of a metal band called Shrifft and has on at least one occasion taken his two-wheel-drive Neon off-roading in the desert east of San Diego).

Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, he showed early signs of taking up a career in food science. He recalls asking a teacher how to make Kool-Aid properly. "It turns out there is a right answer," he says. (You first mix the Kool-Aid with sugar and then stir the mixture into water.)

A new career path

He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, a cooking certificate (he was briefly chef de partie at a French restaurant in Winnipeg), and a master's in food science and agricultural chemistry. He set out to be a philosophy professor and planned to work his way through graduate school by cooking, but says he had an "existential crisis" (he was reading Kierkegaard at the time) when told that academic job prospects were slim. "I spent every day for two months in the career center." Seminal experiments in cake baking for a junior high school science project helped solidify his decision to pursue a career in food science.

He started working at CP Kelco in early 2006. That wasn't long after technical support representative Amy Wong received a phone call from sales representative Fany Setiyo of Le Sanctuaire, a supplier of ingredients to chefs. Setiyo was trying to source a certain type of pectin on behalf of chef Ludovic Lefebvre, who was preparing for an appearance on "Iron Chef," and Wong overnighted some samples to New York.

Chefs from across the country were calling to ask for samples of the stuff CP Kelco sells to its food-manufacturing clients by the truckload. "We were spending a lot of time fielding calls," Wong says. A partnership was struck between CP Kelco and Le Sanctuaire, now the exclusive distributor of its products to chefs.

"When we first started carrying this stuff, everybody thought we were crazy," Setiyo says. "It was risky. What if it doesn't sell?" Le Sanctuaire (which has a San Francisco showroom and online store), now carries about 30 types of hydrocolloids from various producers.

"We knew what was going on with chefs was really interesting," says Wong, who along with Russin and Henri Monty, then director of innovations for the Americas, turned into a sort of culinary outreach team. "It's Ted who gives so much of his own time."

In the lab, Russin formulates salad dressings and comes up with products such as a foam for coffee that can be squirted out of a can and a self-layering dessert for which CP Kelco has submitted a patent application. He also has helped chefs in their kitchens and delivered lectures to enthusiasts, food professionals and students at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and at Greystone in Napa, Calif., on topics such as "Hydrocolloids: An Overview and Toolbox" and "Different Kinds of Thick."

Russin is writing a chapter for a planned Culinary Institute text, "Introduction to Culinary Arts and Sciences," in which he covers physics and chemistry in the kitchen. And he is contributing to a forthcoming book about the techniques of modern cuisine by Chris Young, former manager of food research at the Fat Duck, and Nathan Myrhvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer.

Art of the possible

Russin tends to talk about desserts as "systems" and discusses cooking in terms of heuristic techniques but also has the rare ability to convey complicated concepts to laypeople. "Sometimes he'll go off on something, and I'll say, 'Ted, break it down to me in 10 words or less,' and he does," says Adrian Vasquez, pastry chef at Providence in Los Angeles. "Ted in my book is a genius."

When Russin stops by El Bizcocho, the restaurant at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in Escondido, he is treated like a minor celebrity. "I couldn't believe it when I found out that these guys were right here in our own backyard," executive chef Judd Canepari says.

Russin pulls out his laptop and opens a spreadsheet that shows the iterations of an experiment he'd worked on with chef de cuisine Steven Rojas. "Chefs make fun of me for this and then beg me to send it to them over e-mail," Russin says.

Rojas is making a rum-and-coke gel with gellan gum that he carbonates in a CO2 canister. He has been making it with 1% gellan gum. "That's really high. Do you know the brix?" Russin asks, referring to the dissolved solids-to-water ratio.

Another of Rojas' desserts comes to the table with a small glass container of watermelon gel. A server picks up the container, shakes it and the gel becomes a liquid, to be poured around compressed frozen watermelon and sorbet.

"I am constantly surprised by chefs' creativity," Russin says. "I had [WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne's] deep-fried hollandaise and before tasting it I thought, 'I don't know why you would do that.' But it was tasty, unctuous, with a nice crust on the outside."

A lot of chefs are really having fun with it, he says. It's progress.

"What is possible?" Russin says. "That's where the conversation begins."


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Cooking...the good and the bad

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Science and stove top goodies

Some culinary science

Thanksgiving 2008

Science and stove top goodies

"At the Stove, a Dash of Science, a Pinch of Folklore"

by

Kenneth Chang

January 6th, 2009

The New York Times

My mother, when she still cooked, always added a dash of sugar to the vegetables she stir-fried. She said it preserved the bright green of the greens. I always thought that was hooey.

Shirley O. Corriher, a biochemist turned folksy food scientist who was sitting at my dining table, said she had not heard of this — but added that sugar does do more to fruits and vegetables than add sweetness.

It also helps preserve their shape. Heat shrinks the plant cells and transforms molecules in the cell walls into pectin, which dissolves. "The cells are falling apart and leaking," said Ms. Corriher, who dissected the science of recipes in her books "Cookwise" and "Bakewise."

"It's mass death and destruction when you heat a fruit or vegetable," she said.

Adding sugar helps keep the glue between the cells intact, she said. "It's preventing the leaking of the acid."

I had invited Ms. Corriher and her husband, Arch, who were in New York from Atlanta for a visit, to dinner to help answer some kitchen curiosities. Cookbooks bark out instructions like boot camp orders — Add oil to pasta water! Salt the eggplant! Brown meat to seal in juices! — and legions of home cooks obediently follow them.

I wondered how many of these truisms had a scientific underpinning and how many were but myths. Browning meat, for instance, does not seal in juices. The char adds flavor, though.

On that evening, I cooked and Ms. Corriher critiqued, telling me why I was doing what I was doing or telling me that what I was doing was silly.

For a second opinion, I later called Harold McGee, who is the author of the food science bible "On Food and Cooking" and who writes "The Curious Cook" column in The Times's dining section.

Ms. Corriher's answer about sugar and vegetables has a factual basis. "Beans are a wonderful example of this," she said. "If you take beans, like Navy beans, cook them for four to six hours, they’re mush refried beans. But if you add sugar and molasses, you can cook them for days. They’re Boston baked beans."

Molasses has calcium, and Boston baked beans call for prodigious quantities of sugar and molasses. The sugar absorbs some of the water, slowing how fast the beans dissolve, and the calcium molecules reinforce the cell walls by linking together with the pectin.

As I grilled shrimp and garlic in a hot cast-iron pan, I asked: should one heat the cooking oil and pan at the same time or heat the pan before adding oil?

Heat the empty pan and then add oil, Ms. Corriher said. And whatever you do, she said, do not add the food when both the pan and oil are cold. That came from her attempts to scramble eggs at a boarding school that she and her first husband ran in the 1960s. "That liquid protein was going down in any nook and cranny in the pan and then you turned on the heat and literally you cooked the food into the pan," she said. "But if you got a hot surface, the food cooks on the surface, not in the surface."

Next dish: roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, browned on the stove in a cast-iron skillet and then roasted in the oven. The dish turned out fine, but I had unknowingly and luckily avoided producing a rotten egg stink. Brussels sprouts — and other vegetables of the Brassica family, including cabbage — release hydrogen sulfide as they cook, particularly when boiled for too long.

"Between five and seven minutes, they double in stinky hydrogen sulfide gas formed," Ms. Corriher said. My browning of the brussels sprouts on the stovetop was shorter than that. In the oven, the transfer of heat from hot air to vegetable occurs more slowly than immersion in boiling water.

A duck leg basted with a soy sauce-rice wine-garlic-ginger-honey sauce provided another lesson in browning.

In addition to adding sweetness, the honey helped brown the duck skin, taking advantage of chemical reactions described by Louis-Camille Maillard a century ago. In the Maillard reaction, at high temperatures, fructose and glucose in the honey reacts with amino acids in the duck, producing a variety of new molecules that add flavor and color.

Ms. Corriher offers this advice for imbuing roast turkey with a rich golden hue: baste it with honey or corn syrup, which is also full of fructose and glucose. These are so-called reducing sugars, which means they have a structure — "a funny tail," Ms. Corriher called it — known as a carbonyl group that takes part in the Maillard reaction. (Sucrose is not a reducing sugar, which is why sugar water does not brown the same way.)

Maillard reactions also produced the dark char on the slab of steak I turned to next. Where's the sugar in a steak? Animal cells contain glycogen, essentially the animal version of starch, which the cells use for storing energy. After the animal is killed, glycogen falls apart into glucose.

As I cooked, the smoke set off the fire alarm. No chemical mystery there: Where there's fire, there's smoke.

For a Chinese chili-braised fish recipe, taken from "Land of Plenty" by Fuchsia Dunlop, the first step calls for marinating the fish in rice wine for several minutes. That struck me as pointless. If you are about to braise a fish in tongue-searing chili sauce, what’s the point of soaking it in wine? The alcohol boils away, and the spiciness ought to obliterate any taste of the wine.

Ms. Corriher had an explanation. It was not the flavor of the wine that was important, but what it did. Alcohol is a solvent. "Some compounds dissolve in water," she said. "Some dissolve in fat. But alcohol dissolves both fat-soluble compounds and water-soluble compounds. You're pulling flavor compounds out of the fish so that they can contribute to the flavor in the sauce."

She recalled Patricia Wells, the Paris-based food writer, asking about the vodka in penne alla vodka: "She said, 'Shirley, why is it that a little vodka in a tomato sauce makes such a huge difference in the taste of the sauce? I boil it after the vodka is added so most of the vodka is gone.' But there's obviously a compound in tomatoes that alcohol dissolves and pulls out into the sauce. And then it doesn’t matter what happens to alcohol. It's done its job."

Mr. McGee agreed with the wine-as-solvent hypothesis, but suspected it was used for the exact opposite reason, to wash off-flavors off the fish. "It's a kind of post-washing cleansing," he said.

(I e-mailed Ms. Dunlop to ask the intended purpose of the wine. Mr. McGee was correct. "The purpose of marinating the fish in salt and wine is to 'qu xing wei' — to dispel so-called 'fishy flavors' (xing wei)," Ms. Dunlop wrote in an e-mail response. "This is a major preoccupation for Chinese chefs and home cooks.")

As for the sugar in stir-fried vegetables, Ms. Corriher decided after some thought that my mother's technique might make some sense. If the sugar slowed the release of acids, perhaps that would help preserve color as well as shape.

Mr. McGee disagreed. "A fraction of a teaspoon is a homeopathic dose," he said. But he added, he did not know for certain. Cooking is chemistry, and the only way to know for sure would be to employ the scientific method.

"If I had been her in your apartment, I would have said, 'Let's do an experiment,'" Mr. McGee said. "We have different interpretations, and an experiment would clarify who was right."


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Some culinary science

Thanksgiving 2008

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Using liquid nitrogen to prepare culinary delights is a far cry from the Happy Meal. Have we become jaded in food preparation? Maybe the simple delights of a meat and potato meal are sufficient.

"The Food Hacker Taking Kitchens to the Future with Science"

Every art needs its scientist. Now cooking has its own. Get ready for the next generation of food to make your head hurt.

by

David Katz

December 1st, 2008

Esquire

You're thirsty. You have just tried a crunchy handful of one of Dave Arnold's edible experiments--homemade pork rinds that taste like fatty Cracker Jacks--and now you'd like something to wash it down with. The easy thing to do would be to pour a cup of tap water from the chrome dispenser in this classroom at the French Culinary Institute, where Arnold runs the culinary-technology program. But that would not be a very Dave Arnold way of getting a glass of water.

Instead, he snatches the cup from your hand and hurries to a closet-sized room containing two industrial gas tanks--carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. One of his lab techs connects the gas mixer's rubber hose to one end of a two-liter bottle filled with New York City tap and begins to inject the water with gas. Arnold takes a sip, makes a dissatisfied face, adjusts the ratio of nitrous to carbon dioxide, and hands over a homemade carbonated water that is soft, creamy, and sweet. That is the Dave Arnold way of getting a glass of water.

Over the past two decades, chefs who rely on science to push the boundaries of cooking have had a huge impact on the world's fine-dining scene. Arnold is their enabler. As cooking science has grown more sophisticated, standard kitchen equipment and techniques just don't do the trick. That's why FCI, a school with roots in traditional cooking and techniques, has built a whole new department around Arnold--a tireless inventor and experimenter who the school believes will not only develop new techniques but also make FCI the intellectual epicenter for this kind of cuisine.

"There's no reason you can't mess with anything and everything," says Arnold, as he manically checks on one of several experiments he has in progress. But he stresses that there's no reason to mess with things if the end result won't be better than the original. "When you create a goddamned delicious product that you can't make in any other way, and it's not just a gimmick, that's when we win," he says.

Although Arnold, thirty-seven, is frequently consulted by the world's most avant-garde chefs--Momofuku's David Chang, Jean Georges's Johnny Iuzzini, and especially WD-50's Wylie Dufresne--he has had no formal culinary training himself. His degree from Yale is in philosophy, and he has an M.F.A. from Columbia. But he's always had an innate mechanical ability and a deep passion for cooking and food history. So one night at WD-50, Arnold introduced himself to Dufresne, and the two discovered a mutual obsessive interest in pushing the technical aspects of cooking. They began an informal collaboration that would eventually lead Arnold to FCI, where he now finds himself teaching students how to operate a rotary evaporator.

Currently the evaporator holds a flask filled with vodka that's blended with enough habanero pepper to kill a man. When the machine is turned on, the alcohol gradually evaporates and collects in another container, taking the habanero flavor with it but leaving the color and severe heat behind. The result is crystal-clear booze that tastes like habanero pepper--deep and smoky--but without any of the habanero burn.

Arnold decides to mix the habanero vodka with ice cubes made of clarified apple juice and garnish it with a cucumber infused with lime. Then he fills an insulated bucket with liquid nitrogen (temperature: --320 degrees), reminds his guests to lower their safety goggles, dips a glass in by its stem, and pulls it out so cold it's smoking. That is the Dave Arnold way to chill a cocktail glass.


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Some culinary science

Some culinary science

Culinary science...simple introduction

A subject near and dear to all: Cooking--the physics of food preparation. It can be done indoors and/or outdoors and for the most part involve three forms of thermodynamics: Radiation [thanks to Einstein], convection [ovens], and conduction [pots, pans, dutch ovens]. How well I remember the aluminum monster sitting on the old gas stove: The pressure cooker. I prayed that the safety valve wasn't plugged. Jeeze--death by green beans. Actually, the physics are rather simple involving the excitation of atoms and increase in kinetic energy which through a sometimes complicated process the chemistry of the product being cooked changes and, well, becomes cooked...ready to eat. It's the chemistry that can get complex when making confections and, say, distilling maple syrup. And the temperatures can be very critical otherwise the complex sugars will do weird things--like burn.

Peanut, soy, sunflower, soy bean, coconut, palm, olive, corn, canola, cotton seed--all vegetable oils used for cooking and have striking different characteristics as to composition, performability, and health. Disregarding their individual palatability, complexity of the saturated fat content and health issues, and whether they are used for cooking foods or as an emulsifier of tasty flavors for salads, the primary function is as a tool in the distribution of heat to cook foods for safe consumption at consistent temperatures without boil off. [Although, a fine roast can be cooked in the convection oven with constant checking and water additions.] Their viscosity, high flash points, high smoke points, and the ability to transfer beneficial thermal activity without being self-consumed as water is are valuable pluses. And as a side note, many spent cooking oils have been considered as alternate fuels and many industrial applications such as inhibiting oxidation and friction reduction in moving parts.

I thought a bit more about the cooking process and remembered that there was an old phrase used by some cooks when discussing the quantity of condiments: A pinch of this and a hint of that--yep, "cook book chemistry". But, the kitchen is a rather cool laboratory. I suppose there are no hard rules and variety is the key word--within the framework of the fundamental of the physical sciences. [ I suppose other sciences too, like biology: Yeast and fresh delights from oceans, lakes, and rivers.] Variables are everywhere: Timing, gas or electric stoves, utensils [copper, aluminum, iron, steel]. Just check the back of a frozen pizza box or Betty Crocker cake mix for cooking or baking instructions. The times are a function of your location: Death Valley or Pike's Peak.

Remember Fourier? Fourier’s law of heat conduction states that the rate at which heat is conducted through a body per unit cross-sectional area is proportional to the negative of the temperature gradient existing in the body.

Expressed like this:

A peculiar phenomena observed in the kitchen [and other places]. Ever prepare salmon patties? You have a iron skillet with a quantity of cooking oil being heated while the salmon is blended with an egg [binder], crackers [filler], and seasoning and check the readiness of the cooking oil by sprinkling a drop or two of water into the skillet and observing the reaction. Violent spattering usually indicates that the cooking oil is hot enough to prepare the salmon patties. This is a peculiar physics phenomena and is called the "Leidenfrost effect" [Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost] [When a surface is at a much higher temperature than that of boiling water (100 degrees C) water will first contact the surface and lift clear to hover on its own vapor layer. Vaporization takes minutes as against seconds for lower surface temperatures.]. Certain types of "pillow lava" demonstrate this concept as well as the spectacular walk over hot coals with bare feet--ARGH.

And let's not forget butter. Probably next to cooking oil, especially olive oil, butter is extensively used in the culinary process. And there is a lot of chemistry in butter...and taste.

"Butter Manufacture"

You may want to exercise caution on this brand.

Do you "brown" your meat? It is basically a non-enzymatic chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar usually requiring the addition of heat. This feature has some essential characteristics when cooking namely the associated flavors when "browning" meat before the actual cooking. Just consider the flavor factor when comparing a roast cooked only in a crockpot or oven without first searing the meat in a skillet. There is a huge difference.

"In days of old/when knights were bold...", whoops wrong intro, but this culinary procedure is ancient and initially intended for preservation rather than cooking and eating enhancements--"brining". With the advent of independent refrigeration systems [ye old refrigerator] where temperatures for the short storage could be maintained around 40°F, there wasn't a need anymore for "brining"--the meat, poultry, and fish were safe from the pesky salmonella bacteria. Well, trends do come and go and "brining" is in vogue now. Now, it is used to show off culinary prowess and add some variety in the pallet of the joys of eating. And there is science there too. The basic idea is to alter the chemistry of proteins and water with a curing time in salt water under refrigeration. Salt, NaCl [sodium chloride], will ionize into positive charged Na ions and negative charged Cl ions. Through the magic of the chemistry of the salt and proteins of the commodity, complex compounds are formed and create gaps in the product where the water will fill. The end result is a product saturated with moisture which combined with the individual's thermoconductive choice will enhance the quality of the product for pleasing consumption. [Seasoning is optional at any point.]

"All About Brining"

Don't forget the eggs.

Eggs...an Exeter University scientist has developed a formula for soft-boiling. The standard time is 3 minutes, but it actually takes a bit longer. The scientist stipulates that one must know the temperature of the egg and its weight.

t=aM2/3loge[2x(Tegg-Twater)/Tyolk-Twater)]

"If M is the egg's mass i.e.: weight, and Tegg is its initial temperature then a medium egg weighing 50g that takes four and a half minutes to cook when it has come straight from the fridge, takes a few seconds less than four minutes to cook if it has been stored at room temperature. A small egg coming straight from the fridge will take about 4 minutes 15 seconds to cook, but a large egg will take almost five and a half minutes. Eggs-act timing thanks to physics."--Institute of Physics.

Cooking some pasta? You have started to boil some water and became busy with other kitchen concerns and noticed that the water was becoming aggressive and about to boil over the pan. Two primary solutions to the problem. Turn the heat down/off or add some common table salt of which you will probably need anyway to season the pasta. Adding the salt will for a short time increase the boiling activity and then suddenly become retarded in volatility. Why? The boiling point was raised calming the situation. Add the pasta and monitor the rolling action to finish cooking the pasta. Actually any non-volatile particulate could be used such as sand--yuck. [Similar idea is involved with ethylene glycol as an addition to water in an automobile's cooling system.] The salt [sodium chloride] exhibits nucleation sites that allow the water to rapidly boil and displace thermal energy. Next time: Check the ebullient frequently.

Speaking of pasta...why does dry spaghetti always break into several pieces?

"Why does dry spaghetti always break into several pieces -- and not just two pieces -- when snapped? This perplexing question has now been answered by two physicists at the University of Paris 6 in France, who say that elastic waves travelling along the pasta cause it to fragment. The result has applications in materials and civil engineering...."

"The physics of pasta"

Why certain prepared foods such as chili or pasta dishes are enhanced in flavor after cooking, chilling, and cooking the next day? The enhanced flavor of certain leftovers is do to the break down of the spices and seasoning used in the original preparation process and allowed to chemically blend together thus altering the intensity. This magic is done over time and in a cool environment. It may well also have to do with an individual's taste buds. But the fact remains that soups, chili, and pasta are enhanced in flavor upon re-cooking.

Martha Filipic [Ohio State University]:

Why is it that stews and soups always taste better after spending a day in the refrigerator?

Well, that's something that lies in the taste buds of the beholder, doesn't it? After all, some people actually despise leftovers, whether it's day-old meatloaf or yesterday's stew.

But many people would agree with you and swear that homemade foods like soups, stews, chili and spaghetti sauce all taste better after cooking them on the stove,then letting them sit in the refrigerator overnight. However, the scientific reasoning behind this phenomenon isn't clear-cut.

Many food scientists believe "flavor blending" is at work. That is, when you mix different ingredients together and add herbs and spices, their distinct flavors begin to merge. The longer they're together, the more they mingle. If scientists were to measure the compounds that produce the food's overall taste, they would initially find many spikes and peaks of the distinct flavors. Over time, those spikes and peaks would dissipate as the flavors combined. The chili powder in chili would become less harsh; the beans in the mix would be less "beany" but more flavorful from the spices, tomatoes and meat.

What's happening is that the chemicals and oils that produce flavor and aroma are being released from the different ingredients. That doesn't always happen quickly, and it may not totally occur while the food cooks.

You can see that kind of occurrence at work with the new "Magic Twist" Kool-Aid drinks. For example, the "Changin' Cherry" flavor starts green and turns blue -- although it always tastes like cherry. How does it work? It uses two colorings -- one yellow and the other blue. The initial color is a blend of the two, making the drink green. As more of the less-soluble blue coloring agent gets released, it overwhelms the yellow dye, changing the color of the beverage to blue. A similar but more subtle type of thing happens with flavor compounds: Some may take longer than others to be released.

Another factor also may affect the flavor of leftovers: As you reheat the food, more water is released as steam. That alone can intensify the flavor of your favorite soup, making you think it tastes better the next day.

Even before the food is to be prepared, some thought should be given to the cooking instruments used--the pots and pans. And some knowledge of the thermal source too--gas or electric.

"Cooking for Engineers"


I hate the %$%$#$% things but they are useful and effective--"pressure cookers". All of it involves temperature, pressure and volume [gas law (PV=nrt)].

"How Does A Pressure Cooker Work?"



PolyTetraFluoroEthylene is a fluorocarbon-based polymer and most familiar in the kitchen as non-stick cookware. Physics of material coatings at work...also saves cleanup time too.

"The History of Teflon®"

[tetrafluoroethylene / polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)]

The story of Teflon® began April 6, 1938, at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey. DuPont chemist, Dr. Roy J. Plunkett, was working with gases related to Freon® refrigerants, another DuPont product. Upon checking a frozen, compressed sample of tetrafluoroethylene, he and his associates discovered that the sample had polymerized spontaneously into a white, waxy solid to form polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE).

PTFE is inert to virtually all chemicals and is considered the most slippery material in existence. These properties have made it one of the most valuable and versatile technologies ever invented, contributing to significant advancements in areas such as aerospace, communications, electronics, industrial processes and architecture. As DuPont registered trademark Teflon®, it has become a familiar household name, recognized worldwide for the superior non-stick properties associated with its use as a coating on cookware and as a soil and stain repellant for fabrics and textile products.

The Teflon® trademark was coined by DuPont and registered in 1945; the first products were sold commercially under the trademark beginning in 1946. Applications and product innovations snowballed quickly. Today, the family of Teflon® fluoropolymers from DuPont consists of: PTFE, the original resin; FEP, introduced in 1960; Tefzel® ETFE in 1970; and PFA, in 1972.

The invention of PTFE has been described as "an example of serendipity, a flash of genius, a lucky accident ... even a mixture of all three." Whatever the exact circumstances of the discovery, one thing is certain: PTFE revolutionized the plastics industry and, in turn, gave birth to limitless applications of benefit to mankind. In 1990, U.S. President George Bush presented the National Medal of Technology to DuPont for the company's pioneering role in the development and commercialization of man-made polymers over the last half century. The citation lists Teflon® fluoropolymer resin as one of these special products.

Dr. Roy Plunkett (1911-1994) has been recognized the world over by scientific, academic and civic communities. He was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1973, and, in 1985, into the National Inventors' Hall of Fame joining such distinguished scientists and innovators as Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur and the Wright Brothers.

The spirit of invention with DuPont fluoropolymers that was led by Dr. Plunkett is commemorated globally with the DuPont Plunkett Awards For Innovation With Teflon®.

Okay, you have sauteed, fried, baked, caramelized, browned, boiled, brined, roasted...and boasted about your cooking acumen. Everyone gained five pounds...now, it's time to clean up the mess. No automatic dishwashers for this trip...you fill a sink full of hot water and detergent and spend the next 45 minutes scrubbing, washing, rinsing, drying, and replacing everything that was soiled. A full tummy and a clean kitchen yield a Smile .

Now consider what is happening in the sink full of dirty dishes. Hot [thermal] water accelerates the complex chemistry and physics of emulsifying the grime and grease as well as a little "elbow grease" on the nonstick pans [thermal, friction, chemistry].

Now is the time for some dessert: Perhaps chocolate caramel pecan cheesecake, blueberry cobbler, or persimmon pudding. Maybe just a bowl of ice cream. And top it off appreciating the chemistry and physics a fine sniffer of VSOP Armagnac [brandy]. But all of that is another story.

A late night snack: Popcorn

""Let’s suck away!" physicist Paul Quinn announces, flipping the switch on his stove-top vacuum cooker. There’s a long, low gurgling noise as a gauge registers the pressure drop inside, and the sound of muted machine-gun fire rattles the pot. Almost immediately, Quinn's lab at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania is permeated with 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, the aroma given off by popcorn as it cooks. Eight minutes later, he removes the lid to reveal a pot brimming with fresh Orville Redenbacher's. Though it's not apparent until the contents are poured into a graduated beaker, this popcorn has almost twice the volume of regular stove-top popcorn."

"Giving popcorn more pop!"

Cutting edge research tackles how to boost its fluffy volume and end forever the pesky problem of 'Old Maids'

by

Alana Semuels

May 2nd, 2005

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At this very moment, serious-minded scientists are hard at work. Some are trying to cure cancer, some are detecting global warming, others are transplanting organs and pumping hearts back to life. And then there are the guys studying popcorn. Whether it be increasing the size of an individual piece or eliminating "Old Maids," those annoying unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bowl, researchers from Kutztown to California have focused their efforts on making popcorn just a little bit better for all Americans.
While the Americans who consume 17 billion quarts of popped popcorn a year aren't exactly clamoring for a popcorn revolution, the average man off the street might not object to having his 54 quarts of popcorn a year fluffier and fully popped. And even if he wouldn't, scientists at Purdue University's Whistler Center for Carbohydrate Research want to know. They have been studying the practical applications of carbohydrates for years, and recently -- or should we say finally -- got around to wondering just how to reduce the number of popcorn kernels that don't pop. "We just wanted to see whether there is anything at the structural level that can be ascribed to the popping performance," said Rengaswami Chandrasekaran, a professor of structural biochemistry at Purdue University. The physics of why kernels pop are simple. An outer shell called the pericarp locks moisture inside of the kernel until it is heated, swelling the kernel until the pericarp ruptures. When the kernel pops, the moisture inside is released; the result is the fluffy stuff we call popcorn. But in some breeds of popcorn, the physics don't work out quite as well. Chandrasekaran and his colleagues studied 14 genetic varieties of popcorn and found that the kernels with the strongest pericarp produce the fewest unpopped kernels.
A kernel with a stronger pericarp can hold moisture better than a kernel with a weaker one, they found. This moisture remains in the kernel as the pressure inside builds with the heat, while in kernels with weaker pericarps, the moisture can leak out, so the pressure will not build up, and the kernel will never pop. This doesn't have too much relevance to the everyday popcorn eater -- yet. But in a food industry where more is usually better, it might not be long before it does. "This opens up new avenues to the breeders to breed better popcorn varieties," Chandrasekaran said. "You can do that by natural selection or by genetic engineering." Not able to genetically engineer your own popcorn? You might ask Paul Quinn if he'll lend you his special popcorn machine to make better popcorn.
Quinn was a graduate student at Lehigh University in 1999 when his adviser, Daniel Hong, started thinking about how to apply physics to everyday things. He published a paper looking at popcorn as a simple model of adiabatic expansion -- similar to the bursting of an overinflated tire. He and Quinn, along with graduate student Joseph Both, wanted to see if they could make kernels of popcorn even bigger. Hong died of complications from a liver transplant in 2002 and Both moved on to Stanford University, but Quinn, who had already left Lehigh, decided to finish the experiment.
So he built a vacuum popper. Quinn, now an assistant professor of physics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, hooked a vacuum pump into a stovetop pressure cooker, hoping that the decrease in pressure would allow the kernels to expand further than they do in a microwave or in a regular stovetop popper. To his surprise, the popcorn was almost twice as big as regular popcorn, and had fewer unpopped kernels. He doubled the popcorn's volume. "The theory is very simple, which is why we didn't think it was going to work," Quinn said. Although his training is in physics and granular materials, Quinn is continuing work on his special popper, and has applied for a patent on the device. The new apparatus would let the everyday popcorn lover take advantage of the process he discovered, though he's secretive about it for now. Discover magazine describes it as a contraption with two dog-food bowls and an off-the-shelf microwave. Quinn said results of his testing thus far are promising. But both Quinn and Chandrasekaran say their work is not just for popcorn eaters. The Carbohydrate Center conducts all sorts of research about starches like popcorn; finding a way to slow the digestion of starches, for instance, might help reduce obesity, Chandrasekaran said. Quinn doesn't want to have much to do with the food production; he says he just likes the pure physics of popcorn. If he makes money from his new device, then all the better, but he's not expecting much. "Me, I just like it as a learning tool," he said. "I'll see where it takes me."


And finally..."If you are working on a Ph. D., chances are you're too busy feeding your brain to plan your next meal. Particle physicists share how they managed when they needed cheap or fast meals during grad school."

From Symmetry [Fermilab publication on particle physics]:

"Noodles à la Kephart"

by

Bob Kephart

"Noodles à la Kephart got me through graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook."

Boil a large package of macaroni.

When cooked, add a brick of Velveeta cheese and a package of the cheapest hot dogs* you can find, cut up.

Stir.

Empty into dish.

Eat for lunch and dinner each day for one week.

When finished, return to Step 1.

May be garnished with canned peas, eaten cold from can.

*Caution: Do not read ingredients on hot dog package.

"The Science At the Very Soul of Cooking
The short line from hunks of meat on spits to cranberry foam on Top Chef"

by

Bruno Maddox

December 27, 2007

Discover

I thought the "pizza pebbles" at restau­rant WD~50 had a lot going for them. Into each of the four brownish, marble-size spheres-arranged in one of the straightest rows you'll ever see-chef Wylie Dufresne seemed to have captured both the essence and the totality of an entire New York pizzeria. You could literally taste all of it: the pizza, the decor, the classic surfeit of oregano, even the jaded, fat dexterity of the staff-all in a small, brown pellet with a soft, futuristic texture. Quite remarkable.

My companion managed only half a pebble, declared it tasted "like sand," and asked if I wanted to finish hers. I declined with a laugh and patted her knee. She's a sweet, funny kid, and I like her a lot.

Next up was Dufresne’s famous "knot foie," a thick, squared-off shoelace of pale pink foie gras tied up and garnished with miniature sugary breakfast cereal. Regular foie gras will break if you try to knot it, the waiter told us. After months of experimentation, Dufresne hit upon the trick of gently melting the foie gras, stabilizing it with agar gum, then cooling it, at which point it apparently becomes as pliant as a pipe cleaner.

"But why knot it at all?" asked my companion.

"Oh," said the waiter. "This is an example of Wylie’s being playful."

I apologized to him with my face and he left. He'd given my companion more explanation than she deserved, I reckoned. However not long after, having watched her nibble and reject a cube of Dufresne's legendary fried mayonnaise, I decided it was time to do some explaining myself.

See, bashing Dufresne's style of food preparation is in vogue right now, at least among a small but fierce group that includes serious foodies, most culturally literate Europeans, and untold millions of Americans who follow the hit Bravo reality series Top Chef.

If you didn't watch the season in question, you missed something tragic and beautiful. The villain of the series was a strange young man named Marcel Vigneron. His hairstyle was a gigantic rear-mounted pompadour, like an enormous pair of elf ears rendered in hair. His demeanor was that of a young Peter Lorre, with the swivelly eyes and the permanent smirk and the reedy, snickery voice. And Marcel was a self-declared believer in something he called "molecular gastronomy," a faith he expressed, to the deepening bewilderment of the judging panel, by garnishing dish after dish with a sticky blob of colored foam.

On TV, at least, the foam looked like the kind of thing insects leave on twigs after laying a bunch of nasty eggs, but Marcel was proud of it. "And Marcel, what do you have for us?" Padma Lakshmi, the world’s most beautiful woman, would ask him, looking concerned, because she could plainly see that there was foam. "Uh . . . just a turkey roulade," he’d mumble. "With a cranberry foam." The other contestants called him "foam boy," claimed to detect a paucity of sexual experience in a cherry tart he made that was supposed to embody lust, and eventually drank a lot of wine and tried to shave his head.

Molecular gastronomy is, you have probably gathered by now, the same high art that Dufresne practices, and the idea that it is a steaming pile of pretentious nonsense is nothing new. In fact it’s as old-some would say exactly as old-as the term “molecular gastronomy” itself. It didn’t help that the term was coinvented and popularized by a grand Frenchman by the name of Hervé This (pronounced TEESS). But to the movement’s many critics, the bigger problem is that molecular gastronomy doesn’t actually mean anything. Gastronomy, after all, is just a fancy term for the practice of good cooking. As for molecular . . . well, what This seemed to be calling for was a new approach to cooking that would embrace Science without apology. But all cooking is molecular, and it always has been.

When the first cavemen impaled chunks of meat on sticks and held them in the fire, they did so in a deliberate attempt to alter the molecular structure of the meat, even if they lacked the fancy words to say so. Not only has cooking always been molecular, but cooks have always looked to Science in hopes of improving their recipes. Ask any Italian chef why he’s so picky about the rice in his risotto, and he’ll tell you that a high starch content (starch being a tidy combination of two molecules) results in a creamier finished product. Ask him how to check the doneness of a piece of meat, and he might suggest a scientific instrument known as a thermometer.

It’s a point so obvious one feels silly making it. The relationship of cooking to Science is the same as that of engineering to Science: an intimacy that approaches identity. Which does raise the question of what This and his co-movementists thought they were bringing to the table.

Gimmickry is the cynic's answer. At El Bulli in Spain, chef Ferran Adrià Acosta, the first legend of molecular gastronomy-Babe Ruth to This’s Abner Doubleday-dazzles his diners with gastronomic impossibilities from liquid ham croquettes to caviar made from apples. At the Fat Duck restaurant outside London, the movement’s reigning king, Heston Blumenthal, is serving up snail porridge and has started encouraging his diners to wear headphones, into which can be piped the sound of their own chewing.

At first, second, and third glances, molecular gastronomy seems a clear-cut analogue of the progressive rock movement that briefly ruined popular music in the 1970s. Both cases involve a handful of nerdy left-brain men taking it upon themselves to grandly overthink, reinvent, and almost take credit for a previously easy­going medium that had been getting on fine without them. The progressive rockers-Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, to name but three-can today at least try to argue that popular music was in a rut when they came along and that if nothing else-such as listenable-their self-consciously intellectual approach to music was at least different.

But since when has food been in a rut? One of the precious things about food is that it’s one of the few pleasures in life whose novelty never wears off. When This invented molecular gastronomy, it wasn’t as if anyone was complaining about being served yet another delicious, lovingly prepared hot meal. Where, then, do these self-appointed revolutionaries get off, with their fancy foams and gels? Who asked them to fix food, when food was one of the few things in the world that wasn’t ever broke?

No one asked them, any honest answer to that question must begin. However, it must then necessarily continue: But where did you get the idea that food wasn't, or isn't, broke? Try telling that to a salmonella sufferer or to a nut-allergic baseball fan for whom the phrase "peanuts and cracker­jack" is just an abstract string of syllables. Try telling a camp full of refugees that the best meal the guilty rich will ever be able to send them is a bag of uncooked U.N. flour. No, I didn't think so.

Am I suggesting we feed, and simultaneously enchant, the poor by flinging them handfuls of Wylie Dufresne's knotted foie gras? At the risk of disappointing my detractors, I am not. But it takes a very blink­ered view of the world to gaze upon a chef attempting to redesign our diet from the molecules up and declare the whole thing pretentious and vain-especially since those don’t strike me as very serious charges against a movement with the world-changing potential of molecular gastronomy. The age looms near when a man like Wylie Dufresne will follow his muse into the DNA lab, rearranging the genetic code of a potato to make it dance to his tune in some highfalutin appetizer and accidentally curing world hunger in the process. Scientists are already designing pork chops that go down like health food and tomatoes that vaccinate their eaters against hepatitis.

The need of certain people to understand the science of food has given us everything we have: long, happy lives full of drunken evenings; of campfire marshmallows; of spraying whipped cream across a special lady’s abdomen. . . . That these heroes are no longer unsung, that they have organized themselves beneath the banner of molecular gastronomy and are pushing into the future with more drive and focus than before is not a snub to those earlier science cooks but a fulfillment of what surely must have been their dream. The least the rest of us can do is keep an open mind to the new concoctions of molecular gastronomy.

Is Wylie Dufresne’s fried mayonnaise delicious? Does it eclipse the memory of your grandmother's meat loaf? It does not. But you should have seen the astonishment that filled the face of an expert on colloidal chemistry, whom I found myself sitting next to at a dinner last week, when I happened to mention Wylie's fried mayo.

"Fried," she began, then shook her head. "No. You can’t fry mayonnaise. The heat will break the emulsion. And the colloids . . . They-you can fry mayonnaise?"

Yes, I told her, taking a peculiar pride in someone else’s accomplishment. You can now.


On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by, Harold McGee.

ISBN-10: 0684800012

ISBN-13: 978-0684800011

Publishers Weekly wrote:

Before antioxidants, extra-virgin olive oil and supermarket sushi commanded public obsession, the first edition of this book swept readers and cooks into the everyday magic of the kitchen: it became an overnight classic. Now, 20 years later, McGee has taken his slightly outdated volume and turned it into a stunning masterpiece that combines science, linguistics, history, poetry and, of course, gastronomy. He dances from the spicy flavor of Hawaiian seaweed to the scientific method of creating no-stir peanut butter, quoting Chinese poet Shu Xi and biblical proverbs along the way. McGee's conversational style-rich with exclamation points and everyday examples-allows him to explain complex chemical reactions, like caramelization, without dumbing them down. His book will also be hailed as groundbreaking in its breakdown of taste and flavor. Though several cookbooks have begun to answer the questions of why certain foods go well together, McGee draws on recent agricultural research, neuroscience reviews and chemical publications to chart the different flavor chemicals in herbs and spices, fruits and vegetables. Odd synergies appear, like the creation of fruity esters in dry-cured ham-the same that occur naturally in melons! McGee also corrects the European bias of the first edition, moving beyond the Mediterranean to discuss the foods of Asia and Mexico. Almost every single page of this edition has been rewritten, but the book retains the same light touch as the original. McGee has successfully revised the bible of food science-and produced a fascinating, charming text.