THE CHEMISTRY OF WEIRD–TASTING FOOD!
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Today’s supermarkets offer us every item we could possibly need. But take a closer look. In amongst the stacked shelves you’ll notice some seriously weird-flavoured foods in between the veg, meat and bread. Where do these flavours come from and should we be worried? Food Guru Natasha Agabalyan finds out. Banoffee pie yoghurt anyone? It seems the food industry is changing – and weird and wonderful tastes are the future. There’s even charcoal-topped cheesecake – made in response to we consumers, who are apparently looking to broaden our taste horizons. There’s more than a little Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in all of this – but there’s plenty of intriguing food-science that makes it possible.
“Mommy – I want to be a flavourist when I grow up!” Few people realise that most food producers don’t actually conceive the flavours of their foods. Instead, they employ the services of a flavour company and its specially trained chemists: flavourists. A specialist chemist who uses tools and methods similar to perfumers, a flavourist tweaks and
THE BASICS OF FLAVOUR-MAKING: Replicating a flavour is something of an art form. Our friends the flavourists would say that a flavour has three key components: • A character item, which makes a large
contribution to the flavour as it smells or tastes of the required flavour. • A contributory item, which enhances the
main flavour even if, on its own, it doesn’t actually have the flavour we’re after. • A differential item, which is not essential
but can add some character reminiscent of the target flavour.
modifies the taste and smell of food. Much of the training is done on-the-job, so an up-andcoming flavourist may have fairly little formal education. The profession only came about once home refrigeration became affordable. It soon became important to the food industry to make foods which stayed flavourful even after being preserved for long periods. Today, the tools of the trade are often artificiallycreated flavours. Cheaper and more economical than herbs and fruit extracts, many of these concoctions are truly bizarre.
The alchemist’s guide to flavour creation How do scientists discover how to make these synthetic flavours? The best place to start is their naturally-occurring cousins. Chemists start out by analysing the natural oil, juice or extract to discover all the chemical compounds it contains. Armed with the list of taste bud tickling chemicals, the chemists then try to reassemble the natural product in the lab. Those of you still haunted by the memory of school chemistry classes may remember a process called distillation – which involves various bits of glassware, rubber tubing and the trusty school Bunsen burner. Chemicals all boil at different temperatures (water boils at 100°C, while alcohol boils at a lower temperature of 78°C). And because the boiling points of major chemical are well known, the lab workers can use them as clues to figure out the identity of chemicals present in a mixture. Scientists can also look at the chemicals in more high-tech ways – one popular technique is ‘spectroscopy’, which exploits the way different chemicals behave when bombarded with infrared and ultraviolet light to help identify them. The mixture of chemicals in a natural oil or juice can even be analysed using a more visuallyappealing technique called ‘chromatography’. (Going back to school science classes, you may have used a type of chromatograph to separate out all the colours that make up the ink of a pen; other kinds of chromatography work according to a similar principle.) Using these various tests, an astounding number of different chemicals have been found in flavours that we would otherwise have thought to be simple: apple contains 29 and the satisfying taste of coffee relies on nearly 100 different chemicals! Now you might think all chemists would have to do is recombine these chemicals to create
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