Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor
I can’t quite describe what’s in my
mouth. It’s sort of savoury, but with a hint of sour, a bit oat-like
too. It’s overwhelmingly delicious. Luckily for me, this is the first
of six puddings that not only use science to boost my sensations, but
are also designed to reveal to me my true love and even how many years
it will be until I marry.
I’m at Eat Rich or Die Trying, a quarterly dining club dedicated to
desserts, located at the Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch, London. Given
it’s just around Valentine’s Day, they’ve pointed cupid’s arrow into
the kitchen to produce a sugary feast that promises to guide diners
from love at first sight to romance’s bitter end.
And that’s why words are failing me. My first course has been
created by Blanche and Shock, a design studio and catering company in
London who describe their dessert “as tingly and difficult to pin down
as the first inkling of love.” By incorporating an umami element into
the concoction – in this case using porcini crème fraiche – these
clever chefs designed a puzzling plate that is disconcertingly
delicious but difficult to work out why. Umami is the taste of
glutamates and nucleotides that is now widely accepted as the fifth
sensation alongside bitter, sweet, sour and salty. Together with a
spiced cox apple, tea bread and honey, the mixture creates a blend of
flavours that everyone around my table agrees cleverly mirrors the
experience of being attracted to someone, though none of us quite knows
why.
As your granny will tell you, any decent relationship must next
involve “courtship”. Andrew Stellitano from food design company
Astarism is fascinated by the evolution of the love story. Tonight, for
the second course, he incorporates a selection of ingredients prized
for their power to stimulate or attract love. Central to the plate is a
rice milk ice cream. Experiments in rats have shown that a chemical
found in rice called cadmium mimics the effect of oestrogen in women,
and females with high levels of oestrogen are perceived as more
healthy, feminine and attractive, so perhaps he’s onto something here.
Stellitano’s dessert is garnished with a tuile, which I am
encouraged to shatter and count the pieces – apparently to reveal how
many years I will wait until marriage. Delicately, I tap my tuile. It
cracks into four. I glance to my right, just in time to see my dining
partner Sarah smash her spoon into the dessert, her tuile splitting
into a thousand tiny pieces. Some fly off her plate and scatter across
the tablecloth, others land on the floor. Snorts of laughter erupt
around the table.
One after another, more love-themed desserts are placed in front of
us. A soot and salt drop scone by ‘The Curious Confectioner’ is a
highlight. With the prospect of six puddings on the menu, I’m pleased
to hear that its ingredients include activated charcoal, a highly
absorbent element thought to help aid digestion.
“Is it weird that I’m slightly nervous?” asks Sarah as we move onto
the fourth desert, called ”The Marriage”, before tucking into the
fifth, which supposedly represents the bitter sufferings of love. While
spiced chocolate ganache does give a bitter twist to the meal,
chocolate has another connection with love and attraction. Early in a
relationship dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and
reward become highly active, and supposedly the more intense the
relationship the greater the activity. The same regions are active when
a person enjoys chocolate, according to Helen Fisher, an anthropologist
from Rutgers University in New Jersey. It appears tonight’s molecular
sorcerers have at last hit upon a dessert that really might entice
feelings of love and attraction. It’s certainly very tasty.
Like all good fairy tales, my dessert reverie ends as the clock
strikes midnight. The final treat is cookie dough cooked three ways,
including sous-vide, in which the food is placed in a vacuum bag and
heated gently in water. The chef says the idea is that the dough is
cooked but retains much of the experience of eating dough from the
bowl. Unfortunately the overwhelming flavour of aniseed and the
resemblance of scrambled egg on my plate were just too much for my
stomach to handle this late into the night.
For someone with a sweet tooth, love of science and food, and an
overactive imagination, the majority of this evening was a delight.
It’s just a shame this love story, like many in the past, left me
tired, emotionally drained and with a bitter taste in my mouth.
http://www.newscientist.com/
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