After the Erice conference, I make a pilgrimage to the Thames Valley to taste the future of molecular gastronomy. Blumenthal's restaurant, The Fat Duck, is tucked away in Bray, another lovely village with ancient credentials, and occupies a 460-year-old building that used to be a pub: whitewashed walls, splashy abstract paintings, worm-eaten ceiling timbers.
When Blumenthal took over the restaurant, he says, he served classic French dishes that he learned as a teenager, when he got himself a Larousse Gastronomique and cooked his way through the book. Maybe he would still be cooking that way if he hadn't gone crazy one day over a pot of boiling water and green beans. When he salted the water to fix the color—as cookbooks had taught him—his haricots turned an embarrassing khaki-yellow. He experimented further, deleting the salt and then substituting bottled water for tap. Greener beans were his. But why? He rang up the nearest physicist. Who happened to be Peter Barham, the man with the penguin obsession at the Erice conference.
"I pick up the phone," says Barham, "and I hear, 'Hello, I'm a chef. Is there any good reason why I should add salt when I'm boiling vegetables? And should I use bottled water?'" Barham trekked to The Fat Duck like a doctor making a house call, and he and Blumenthal diagnosed the haricot disease: The restaurant's tap water was loaded with calcium, and the mineral was zapping the vegetable's chlorophyll. Filtering the water solved the problem.
"I'd been rubbish at science in school," Blumenthal says, but now he sensed that chemistry and physics could help him reshape the way he cooked. He started hanging out with Barham in the kitchen, playing around with wild ideas, and the physicist introduced him to a network of European scientists who are intrigued by the notion of helping a real-life chef.
Consider the matter of the mashed potatoes and the artificial nose machine.
Blumenthal had been mulling over a problem that had been floating on the fringes of his culinary consciousness. When he made a potato purée he was never satisfied. Blumenthal flavored it as most American chefs do—with basil or garlic, or infused with truffle oil—but the flavors never seemed to burst through. He tried lime-flavored mashed potatoes, but even then, after a few bites, he could hardly detect the flavoring—it was if the lime and other flavors had simply disappeared.
So Blumenthal turned to his informal science panel for advice. Which is how he found himself sitting in a Geneva laboratory one day with a strange-looking machine hooked up to his nose.
Blumenthal had contacted the Firmenich corporation, which develops and manufactures flavors and fragrances for brand-name products around the world. Firmenich scientists told Blumenthal that if he wanted to perfect his potato purée, he needed to plunge into the latest studies on the physiology of taste and smell, and that meant he would have to learn about the brain.
For instance, scientists have discovered that we taste five basic flavors in our mouths. The taste buds on our tongue and soft palate tell us if something is salty or sour, bitter or sweet—and in the past few years, many scientists in the U.S. and Europe have come to agree with their Japanese counterparts that there's a fifth, an earthy taste known as umami.
But travel up the nose, to the olfactory bulb in the middle of the head: That's where we perceive countless aromas in all their subtle complexity. We "taste" them mainly by smelling aromatic molecules as they waft up our nasal passages (which is why you can barely "taste" anything when you have a cold).
So picture the inside of your mouth as you're chewing mashed potatoes: If a food molecule is as small and light as a molecular feather, and it floats easily up into your head, you'll savor it in its vivid glory. But if the molecule is so big and heavy that it just plops there on your tongue and tumbles down your throat, you'll hardly detect anything at all.
Which brings us back to Blumenthal's problem. Most molecules in potatoes are big lugs, so they sink. Worse, they have a vicious tendency to grab hold of all sorts of lighter molecules and not let go—which means that Blumenthal can add all the ingredients he wants to a pile of potatoes, and the heavier starch molecules will imprison some of them in molecular jail. Fat molecules absorb some lighter molecules in a similarly thuggish way, so when you add butter to flavored potatoes, you're doing double damage.
That, said the Firmenich scientists, was just the beginning of Blumenthal's potato woes. Many chefs (and gourmands) have known intuitively for centuries that when you eat too much of the same thing, you get palate fatigue, as they call it. So chefs serve sorbets between courses in an attempt to "refresh" the palate. They serve "tasting menus" to try to keep your taste buds on their metaphorical toes. Now, Firmenich researchers have helped develop a remarkable machine that displays the onset and progression of palate fatigue visually. They call it the MS Nose. You can buy one for less than half a million dollars.
And that brings us back to Heston Blumenthal, whom we left sitting in the Firmenich laboratory, hooked up to the MS Nose. "They put a little tube up my nostril," Blumenthal remembers. "The tube was connected to a box. And then they gave me a stick of minty chewing gum, and as I chewed it, I could actually see the mint aroma molecules that were up in my nose projected on a small screen."
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