Facts about miracle fruit (miraculin revisited - part 2:2)

Short introduction in Norwegian: I anledning at jeg deltok i en episode om mirakelfrukt på Schrödingers katt på NRK (og YouTube) publiserer jeg to blogginnlegg om temaet. Det første innlegget handler om smakstesting av mirakelfrukt. Innlegget nedenfor er del 2 av 2 og er en samling fakta om mirakelfrukt med referanser til forskningslitteratur. Siden denne bloggen normalt er på engelsk fortsetter jeg herved på engelsk.

On the occasion of me attending an episode of the Norwegian popsci TV series "Schrödingers katt" (and YouTube) about miracle fruit I post two entries on miracle fruit and its key constituent miraculin. The first post describes a tasting of miracle fruit with a number of sour foods. The second post below is a collection of facts about miracle fruit based on research literature. Part 2:2 below is divided into the following main topics:

• Miracle fruit/berry - properties
• Traditional/historic use of miracle fruit
• Taste sensation when using miracle fruit/miraculin
• Cultivation and production
• Use in commercial products, potential applications
• Health risk and governmental/public approval
• Elimination of the sweet-inducing effect
• Mechanism of taste-modifying activity
• Some other sweet and taste-modifying substances
• References

New journal Flavo(u)r for researchers and practitioners

A new open access journal for issues related to Molecular gastronomy has recently arrived: Flavour. According to the editors, the journal "seeks to create a shared forum for the publication of evidence-based research in an open access context that will make it accessible not only to researchers but also the wider community of chefs, policy makers and the public". This is no small ambition.

Norwegian Barista Championships 2011. Part 2c - seminar on profile roasting

In this post I summarise the last seminar I attended at the Norwegian Barista Championships this spring. It was hosted by former world champion barista Tim Wendelboe and focussed on coffee roasting. The following is what I understood from this seminar.

Profile roasting, or roasting profile

As a coffee drinker, I find it interesting to get to know the various roasters' profiles, or roasting personalities so to say. I believe each of the four Norwegian roasters I've gotten to know best have their own rather distinct style. The smallest, Madelynn coffee, have a fairly dark roasting profile resulting in more chocolatey and "brown" aromas with less acidity (and perhaps fruitiness) compared to the other "extreme" among the four of Tim Wendelboe. The coffees from Wendelboe seem to me as extremely clean and rich in acidity, but with slender body. Kaffa roasters, on the other hand, are on the lighter side of roasting but with more full-bodied coffees compared to Wendelboe (some of Kaffa's natural/dry processed coffees are among my all time favourites, I must admit). Finally, Solberg & Hansen being by far the largest speciality coffee roaster in Norway, produces such a wide variety of coffees and roasts that the wide variety might be said to constitute their profile, rather than a specific roasting ideal.

Norwegian Barista Championships 2011. Part 2b - seminar on coffee defects

In this third post from this spring's Norwegian Barista Championships I summarise the most interesting seminar I attended. It was hosted by former world champion barista Tim Wendelboe and focussed on tasting defects in coffee.

I attended two seminars by Tim Wendelboe during this year's event, and of the two the one mentioned here was definitely the most rewarding for me personally.

WORKSHOP/SEMINAR: Flavour defects in coffee

(by Tim Wendelboe)

I always tell my students that if a recipe warn them not to do this or that, they should deliberately try doing it at least once (e.g. don't get egg yolk in the egg whites when whipping meringue, don't open the oven when baking sponge cake etc.). If you don't know how things look or taste when they're failed, it's difficult to have any reference for what's successful. So, go ahead - be disobedient! Tim had indeed done so and collected coffees with various defects in which he brewed cups of defective coffee. The cups were brewed as he would have brewed any other coffee; to the best of one's ability. Not only so, he had also done his best effort to single out the various defects so that we could taste each type of defect separately. Elegant, interesting and very enlightening. The defects we got to taste were:

Faded coffee
(this paragraph has been re-written subsequent to a comment)

at least two reasons for this. The first is past crop vs. new crop. Past crop = coffee that has been stored for some while (e.g. last season's crop) before roasting and sale. This is a typical problem if you are served, say, a Costa Rica coffee this summer because the harvest season is August-December. The second reason for fading is a processing defect if temperature has been too high during drying (e.g. using closed greenhouse-like drying houses with too little airflow). The characteristic of faded coffee is on my palate more subtle and not that critical a defect, but results in lower fruitiness and more woody flavour. The acidity might still be there, but the fruit is more or less gone. So if you get a bag of great Kenya or Panama coffee out of season, don't be surprised if you can't taste all they claim it does on the description on the bag. Also, this defect is easy to get your hands on, even among speciality dealers. Get your hands on a bag of Indian Monsooned Malabar or some Old Brown Java Coffee from Indonesia. These coffees are deliberately aged at the green bean stage to develop a flavour which one would consider being a defect in most other coffee.

Unripe beans
many inexpensive coffees are being uncritically strip picked resulting in a mixture of overripe, unripe and ripe beans; everything is picked at the same time and nothing is thrown away. Characteristic defect flavour would be peanut, old nuts and unpleasant acidity. I would add that unripes also would give a pea-like or grass-like flavour (picture by courtesy of www.coffeeresearch.org).

Norwegian Barista Championships 2011. Part 2a - the seminars

In this second post I summarise shortly the first three seminars I attended during the Norwegian Barista Championships this year.

As mentioned in the previous post, the championships were not only competitions but also a number of seminars and exhibitions (the full programme is given in part 1). The seminars I attended, and thus am able to give some personal reflections upon are described below and in a following post.

SEMINAR: Extract Mojo – Analysis of coffee extracting using refractometer

This 1.5 hr seminar was given by invited contributor David Walsh working with R&D at Marco beverage systems in Ireland (although their web site is a commercial one they've published quite a lot of educational material such as articles and ppt slides). The presentation was in fact much more than a presentation of the Extract Mojo, and the session was a very clear and systematic presentation of coffee extraction in general. Questions discussed and explained were e.g.

Norwegian Barista Championships 2011. Part 1 - general overview

Three days in Ulsteinvik at the Norwegian west coast: Loads of top quality coffee, ample possibilities to learn new things about coffee, interesting seminars, and meeting lots of very nice people. Below follows a report seen through the eyes of a coffee amateur: the things I found most fun, interesting or intriguing.*

I came to this event without many expectation, mostly because I didn't know what to expect. I was quite optimistic because the organisers had made a great effort to promote the event to the general public (see previous post).

Dancing the structure of a molecule + scent vs music revisited

Some time ago I caught a glimpse of a headline about some researchers "dancing their natural science projects", more specifically a biochemist dancing the structure of certain biochemical compounds. I thought the idea was rather far-fetched and didn't give it further thought. After seeing it just recently I find myself being so very wrong... Second part of the post contains a few recent thoughts about a project on scent vs. music.

Have a look at the video below. In the start of the video I didn't see the point, but after a while things started to dawn on me.

Lipids Dance! from Kerstin Wagner on Vimeo.

After watching the video I realised that this did indeed illustrate behaviour of the molecules in question in a very vivid way. I'm of the opinion that one should look for as many possible ways of describing and explaining a phenomenon as possible. If a student tells you they don't understand what you're saying there is seldom any help in repeating the same words one more time. You need to find new words, some other metaphor, another mental representation.

How small are actually the things food is made of?

How small are single plant cells, proteins, sugar molecules? What about those things that spoil our food: bacteria, enzymes? All of them are really small, but when things get this small it is often difficult to grasp that there are huge differences in smallness as well. Below is a tip on how you might get to grips with this.

When dealing with food we talk or read about proteins, carbohydrates, plant cells, enzymes, bacteria and lots of different "really small things". Enzymes react, making fruit brown, proteins and sugars react to give what we perceive as brown coloured and pleasant smelling bread crust. Plant cells absorb or lose water through osmosis to become hydrated or dried, resulting in crunchy or dry/flabby vegetables or fruit. Bacteria and fungi either help us making leavened bread or yogurt, or they spoil our food rendering it unappetizing or even unhealthy.

Usually we talk of these things as macroscopic entities: proteins = eggs, fungi = visible mould on old bread, carbohydrates = sugar in the sugar cup. However, some times these are referred to in terms of their microscopic properties, and this is among the challenges when teaching about food (many of these things are actually submicroscopic, but in educational context we commonly refer to this as the "micro level").

The concept of "smallness"

During my time of teaching, I've realised that many people in general have not reflected on several aspects of this feature:

1. there is indeed a microscopic world behind the macroscopic sensible/tangible world, and the latter is often a reflection of the former (after all, eggs are cooked because protein molecules react in certain ways)
2. there are huge differences in actual size between these things which we commonly just think of as "really small"

"The fun-flavoured way to learn science"

Paulina Mata and her colleagues in Portugal have produced a very interesting booklet on "Experiments for the family to do together" (...in the kitchen).

In a previous post on inquiry-based teaching methods and promoting students' argumentation skills I referred to a European Commission report. In this report, it is referred to two best practice examples, one of them being the project Pollen (EU Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006). Slightly embarrassed, I must admit not knowing that a part of this was a resource for families to learn experimenting with and through food.

The Portuguese Pollen team together with Paulina Mata have developed the booklet "The fun-flavoured way to learn science - Experiments for the family to do together" in Portuguese and English.

The booklet is written in a very simple language and seems to be aimed at a general public, both children and adults, in order to stimulate adults to experiment more at home together with their children (or vice versa). It starts out with some general comments and recommendations on experimenting at home, and goes on with a number of very simple and straightforward experiments. One might say that many of the experiments are overly simple ("Why does an ice cube float?", "Do vegetables contain water?" etc.). However, I think that such a "low-level" approach might be a very good idea of several reasons:

One major and one minor literature reference on Molecular gastronomy

At last(!) there is a comprehensive and broad focussed review on molecular gastronomy (MG) in the scientific literature. Also, I stumbled over another scientific paper on the same topic from 2007 which has missed my attention until now.

An important (and seminal?) contribution

Martin at khymos has written a short post on the most recent and comprehensive addition to the scientific publications on MG: "Molecular Gastronomy: A New Emerging Scientific Discipline" written by eight(!) researchers in the field, and is open access. What a gift!

Since it was mentioned already in a paper from 2008 (van der Linden, McClements & Ubbink, ref. here), I've been waiting for this paper for at least a year. It is incredibly welcome that others than Hervé This writes about MG in scientific papers, and now we have several contributions with slightly different viewpoints on the same phenomenon.

A kindred spirit

My first experience with the annual ASE (The Association for Science Education) conference was at The University of Birmingham 3.-6. January. A paradox was that I had to go all the way to England to find that one of the most interesting experiences was to be a Swedish lecturer.

A packed programme with hoards of parallel sessions, spanning most thinkable and unthinkable science education issues; from the highly inspiring/enthusing to the one that give you the feeling "I never thought it was possible to completely ruin something so inherently fascinating". However, one experience left all of the other sessions in the shadows: Hans Persson at the Swedish National Centre for Education in Physics (and The Stockholm Institute of Education) had two sessions: "Creativity in the Science Classroom" and "Curious About Science?". His approach to science teaching was so fresh, vital and inspiring that the session ended in the audience giving standing ovations (the first time I've experienced such after a conference lecture).

What makes this special? First of all, the strong focus on students' interest/attitudes towards science in addition to the knowledge. Interest before knowledge, maybe. If you don't enjoy dealing with science, you won't learn much. Other key factors are having courage to be truly playful and enthusiastic, and utilising every aspect of everyday life to impart science. I also share his quite strong criticism of the kind of science teaching that is separated from everyday life, i.e. lab equipment which its sole purpose is for use in science education, but which doesn't exist anywhere else (note that this primarily applies to primary and secondary school, college/university level may be quite a different ballgame).

The other thing that makes this stand out is that he managed to convince me that he's got a firm foundation for this approach, possibly both theoretical/ideological and empiric, both from primary/secondary school and teacher training. His book on concept building is sure to find it's way to my bedside table soon (only in Swedish, unfortunately, but he's published books in English as well).

Anyway, I don't think I've seen such a fresh approach to science education during my five years in the game, and I decided to post this although strictly it doesn't deal with food and science education (although he touched in on that as well).

A visit at his web page, which bears the subtitle "How can we awaken interest in science and then keep that interest alive?", gives a small glimpse of his thoughts and work. I find this so important that I've put the link in the permanent links list in the right hand margin.

Erik

Link: www.hanper.se (both English and Swedish, but the Swedish pages are somewhat more comprehensive).

Book review: Kitchen Chemistry

It was with immense anticipation i opened the book "Kitchen chemistry" from RS*C (the British Royal Society of Chemistry) when I received it almost a year ago. The book is a collaboration between Ted Lister and the Michelin-star chef Heston Blumenthal known for his Molecular gastronomy-approach to cooking. Upon closing the book after the first read, I must admit I was slightly disappointed (although there are a number of bright spots as well).
Among the things I find attractive is the beautiful layout and extensive digital material following the book, both on CD and on web, including video clips and dynamic Chime molecular structures). Also, RS*C has been very generous in leaving much of the web based resource material for free.

Molecular gastronomy (MG) has afforded a new and very refreshing approach to cooking, bringing science into the home and restaurant kitchen in a wonderful way. The reason for my disappointment is that this book's approach to using science in the classroom (or school kitchen/lab) is, in my opinion, not refreshing in the same sense. This may be exemplified by:

* The table of contents of the book tells us that out of 17 chapters, five are dedicated to salt and its role in cooking. I find this rather lopsided in terms of spending valuable book space trying to catch children's attention to science and food. To me, the sixth chapter "Should beans be cooked with the lid on or off?" also provides an example of what may be interesting to a chef (or an adult), but of limited interest to the children it is claimed to be focused toward: ages 5-11. Is this maybe a result of a chef picking subjects that are the most interesting to him, rather than searching for what may trigger young people? What about taking the French approach of Hervé This and colleagues playing around with egg white foam ("Wind crystals"), an experiment I find fascinating, and which has been successful also in a few Norwegian schools? (see "Egg white foam" posting below)

* Second, the experiments laid out are rather closed ended in the terms that approach, method and result are all given in beforehand. There is little for exploration and imagination for neither teacher nor student if one is to follow the book all the way through using all the resources given on a subject (ppt-files, video and student sheets). Through lack of freedom and open ended experiments, the teacher is in a way relegated. The book seem more directed towards the kind of teacher that would use the resources slavishly, rather than one who would go on experimenting together with the students. Accordingly, teachers wanting to adapt the material to her/his situation and class (rather than following the procedures slavishly) may find that the material has to be revised and readapted to her/his setting, although this seems not to be the intention of the book.

Despite being rather critical, I find a number of fascinating subjects making the book fun to read. Subjects like "The chemistry of flavour" and "The science of ice cream" make my curiosity tick. Furthermore, many home cooks may find it interesting to read about "Why do pans stick?", which by the way R. Wolke has discussed in his book "What Einstein told his cook" posing the wonderful question "Why doesn't anything stick to nonstick cookware? And if nonstick coating won't stick to anything, how do they get it to stick to the pans?". Kitchen Chemistry may be the starting point of fun experiments in the school kitchen, but again - by the teacher that is able to adapt the material to her/his own class and situation rather than following a common path laid out for all.

Maybe the reason for MG being so refreshing, while this book being less, is that MG approaches science on the premises of food/cooking, while this book falls into the traditional pit trap of treating food on the premises of science? For us that are already hooked on science this is a fascinating book with beautiful extra material, but for teachers and students who have not yet fallen in love with the universe of natural sciences, I fear that this may not make it all the way.

Kitchen Chemistry (£19.95) may be obtained from the RS*C Kitchen chemistry web pages (see link above).

Erik

Book: The Science of Chocolate

I finished the book "The Science of Chocolate" yesterday night:



In my opinion, the book is ok for people with a certain scientific overview, but a little heavy on the industrial side to be very relevant to everyday molecular gastronomers (see future postings for definition). The experiments part in the last chapter is fascinating, but should have been elaborated further (experiments are described, but the expected outcome is up to the experimenter himself to find out). "Ideal for those studying food science" (from the synopsis) is probably correct, rather than for the science school teacher who wants to play around with food in the classroom (although some of the experiments probably are relevant and usable).

Erik

Post comment march 2009: The book has now come in a second, revised edition.