food pairing
Alberto Conti
Michael O'Boyle
Alberto Conti
Robert CAUCHI
Regards
robert cauchi
Alberto Conti
Andrea Ossola
Hi Everybody, I am still around after a long silence. You can read many interesting paring & style f food in the book Culinary artist.
Has something similar to what tAlberto's web page shows. I have purchased this book 10 years ago and was a great tool to see what all combination & match you can do.
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Where Texas Welcomes the World
| "Alberto Conti"
<albert...@hotmail.com>
Sent by: molecular-...@googlegroups.com 03/17/2008 11:08 AM
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Martin Lersch
Alberto,
This is a very fascinating topic which I have delved into for some
time. The hypothesis is that if two foods share one or more impact
odorants, chances are that they will go really well together (as I
decided to name the food blogging event which explores such pairings -
more on TGRWT at http://blog.khymos.org/category/tgrwt/).
Although foods can contain several hundred volatile compounds, only a
small handful of these really contribute to the flavor. Those that do
are typically termed "impact odorants" or "key odorants". A nice
introduction to how to determine these odorants is found here:
"Evaluation of the Key Odorants of Foods by Dilution Experiments,
Aroma Models and Omission" by W. Grosch (http://chemse.oxfordjournals.
org/cgi/content/full/26/5/533 - free access!!!).
Based on this I believe that odor activity values (OAV) are crucial in
order to find pairings. I've elaborated on this in a blog post:
http://blog.khymos.org/2007/05/05/two-flavour-pairing-case-studies/
The http://www.foodpairing.be site that you mention provides a very
elegant way of visualizing food pairings, but it has certain
limitations (quoting from
http://blog.khymos.org/2007/11/22/foodpairing-website-launched/) :
"It should be noted that the proximity of the foods in the diagrams is
based on the number of volatile compounds they have in common, not the
actual key odorants. As I have elaborated on previously, pairings like
these should preferably be based on odor activity values (OAV). Or to
put it differently, if the volatiles shared by two foods are not the
ones that actually contribute to the overall flavor, there is no
reason to expect that they go well together from a chemical
perspective."
These limitations also apply to the "They go really well together"
event and probably many of the pairings I've listed at
http://khymos.org/pairings.php as well. But despite this, since the
food pairing hypothesis (if it is true) can only account for a
fraction of the pairings we encounter in the kitchens around the
world, it can always happen that two ingredients work well together,
even if they don't share any impact odorants. Therefore the
foodpairing site can help unlock the creativity of chefs around the
world, and the participants of the TGRWT have already been challenged
to try out ten different food pairings. And even though these results
are not scientific advances, remember what Brillat-Savarin's aphorism:
"The invention of a new dish is of greater importance to the happiness
of mankind, than the discovery of a new star"
Best regards,
Martin
--
Martin Lersch, Ph.D.
Website dedicated to molecular gastronomy
http://blog.khymos.org
http://khymos.org
Alberto Conti
I'm well aware that the final judge of a perfect match is the chef's fine palate.
The links you provided are really helpful: I knew your site and your envaluable work on food, but I've never checked your blog.
Unfortunately I'm really busy with my job, but I'll try to follow TGRWT and hopefully give a contribution.
Cheers
Alberto
> Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 22:35:56 +0200
> From: martin...@gmail.com