Tasty

by John McQuaid

  Jasper Hill was founded by two brothers, Andy and Mateo Kehler. They have backgrounds in sustainable agriculture, but turned their attention to the microscale ecology of deliciousness. At one end, molds and bacteria battle; at the other, the pleasure networks of the brain respond. They know both are equally capricious. “I had a conversation with my six-year-old son last night. He’s turned into a really picky eater,” Andy Kehler told us. “He says, ‘Dad, I’m going to write a book about the best taste.’ That was after he ate a couple of capers with mustard. It definitely wasn’t his pork chop or his potatoes or the awesome mushrooms that we had last night. It was the caper.”

  Deliciousness is a slippery concept. It is an ideal, something chefs aspire to create and everyone wants to experience. It can be roughly defined as what happens when food ingredients, preparation techniques, presentation, and the company of fellow diners merge to create a flavor that transcends its individual elements. Deliciousness is not merely tasting good; spices taste good, but are not delicious. As food manufacturers discovered, it requires a degree of complexity and contrast: varying tastes, aromas, and textures that alert the brain’s pleasure centers, but also provoke the senses, keeping them a little off balance.

  The new wave of culinary science aims to engineer deliciousness. The Jasper Hill staff taste-tests its cheeses and rates them with a detailed checklist. Their trained palates usually reach consensus—it’s the near-great cheeses that provoke wild disagreements. To understand why, they turned to data. Jasper Hill began collecting and graphing all its ratings, making databases much like those generated by the white rats in Opertech’s Philadelphia lab. The ratings are aggregated into a number called the Deliciousness Factor, or DF. It’s a one-to-ten scale, with ten as the best possible incarnation of a particular cheese: a rare achievement. Sevens rank pretty well; sixes and fives are problematic. The data are also broken down to analyze the problem areas. “Spider graphs” show a cheese’s ratings for texture, sweetness, saltiness, rind development, and the trajectory of its ripening over time. Each data point spikes outward around an axis. The bigger and rounder the graph, the better the cheese. If something isn’t right, the numbers are variable and the graph more jagged. The worst collapse back to the center, like a black hole.

  The notion that something sublime like deliciousness can be precisely quantified seems a little absurd. But in the digital age, the world has begun to accumulate vast troves of data that contain hidden patterns of behavior. Graphing cheese flavors as they evolve exposes the flaws in the aging process, or a microbial breakdown, or a period of high humidity. What if ­recipes—or entire cuisines—could be broken down the same way, their interior dynamics exposed by some digital wizardry?

  A good recipe depends on the relationships between ingredients: how they chemically interact and change when mixed together and cooked and how the combination piques the senses. But like the buzzing of microbe metabolisms, recipes are scientific black boxes. Some general principles have been established, such as the Maillard reactions responsible for much of the flavor in cooked food. But the chemical dynamics of individual recipes, developed by trial and error and sips from the stirring spoon, remain obscure. Nicholas Kurti, of the molecular gastronomy movement, once said: “I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.”

  Yong-Yeol Ahn, a physicist and computer scientist, had worked on computer models of metabolic processes and the dynamics of the social network Twitter before turning his attention to cuisine. These subjects may seem unrelated, but each is a complex system with millions of moving pieces; their behavior often follows common, underlying principles that can be analyzed and understood.

  Like disgust, the definition of deliciousness varies widely from place to place, depending on culture and tradition. Some foods don’t travel well: cheese spread west from its birthplace in Turkey, but has never been popular in Asia, and Western palates tend to respond poorly to Asian delicacies such as bird’s nest soup. Yet these are more the exception than the rule; travelers can usually find something delicious anywhere, which suggests that many ingredient combinations transcend geography and history. As an astrophysicist might try to study the fundamental forces that govern the structure of space and time, Ahn tried to find the hidden commonalities and differences across the universe of cuisines.

  Ahn calculated that there were quadrillions of possible recipes that could be made from existing ingredients in the world. Yet he found only a few million in searching the Internet’s largest recipe websites and databases. Vast flavor domains lay unexplored, but perhaps they could be opened up virtually.

  Ahn mined cookbooks and recipes from around the world to build a database of 381 basic ingredients and 1,021 flavor compounds. Those are not very large numbers, but what matters in a network isn’t the number of individual nodes, but the connections between them. A telephone network with two people has only one connection; with four people, six connections; with ten, forty-five connections. To establish the relationships between ingredients, he looked at their shared chemistry: some were very closely related, others distant cousins. This allowed him to quantify their kinship. He mapped the links across a three-dimensional virtual space.

  This grand map of the world’s flavor preferences looked like an array of galaxies. Individual ingredients varied in size depending on their importance. Related ingredients were close together, unrelated ones far apart.

  The geography revealed subterranean differences in deliciousness, shaped by history. Foods from Western Europe and North America tended to be monotonous, with many very closely related ingredients such as eggs, butter, and vanilla. Cuisines from East Asia and Southern Europe employed many strongly contrasting, chemically diverse ingredients, including garlic, soy sauce, and rice. Only cuisines of East Asia, Latin America, and Southern Europe overlapped. All three used a lot of garlic, and pairs of them used different combinations of onions, tomatoes, and cayenne pepper. There was no common element between these areas and Western Europe and North America.

  A Belgian company named Foodpairing is built on this mapping idea. The company’s founder, Bernard Lahousse, says he was inspired by the example of Heston Blumenthal, the chef-proprietor of The Fat Duck, in England. In the 1990s, Blumenthal held meetings with physicists, chemists, and flavorists and asked them for recommendations for his menu. One day, he visited the lab at Firmenich, a flavor company in Geneva. A scientist there noted that some of the chemicals in liver are also emitted in floral scents, particularly jasmine. As the concentration of jasmine aroma rises, the scent takes on a distinctly meaty quality that may help the plant attract insects. When Blumenthal returned to his restaurant, he created a dish of foie gras with jasmine sauce. Later, on a whim, he combined chocolate with caviar. It worked beautifully. When he checked back with the lab, he found both contained high concentrations of amines, partially broken-down proteins that make rich, complex flavors.

  Lahousse, a pharmaceutical engineer by training, became interested in the biochemistry of cuisine in the early 2000s. “I would go to chefs, presenting myself, saying ‘I’m a scientist, how can you use me?’ ” he said. He worked with several of them to refine recipes, and was struck by the limitations they labored under. “Ferran Adrià could close elBulli for six months and try thousands of combinations, then pick one. But most chefs are not able to do that.” (Not being celebrity superchefs, they must work hard just to keep their restaurants running.)

  Lahousse teased apart the contents of fruits, vegetables, chocolates, pita chips, oysters, beef, coffee, vinegar, and wine, among others. He built a database and wrote algorithms that could identify shared aromatic compounds among the foods. The algorithms generate maps similar to Ahn’s. Links to potential matches spring off a central hub. Closely related items are placed near one another and their best potential matches. Some of these pairings
are to be expected, but others are not. Oysters match up well with kiwi and passion fruit, cucumbers with dark chocolate, and milk chocolate with soy sauce. Foodpairing makes its money doing specialized analyses for restaurants and food companies, but Lahousse has made more than a thousand flavor trees publicly available on its website, so chefs, bartenders, and at-home cooks can peruse them for possible inspiration. He has worked on including tastes, textures, and colors into the mix, adding orders of magnitude of complexity.

  After the IBM computer system Watson vanquished human champions on the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011, its inventors applied its cognitive capabilities to other fields. One was cuisine: Watson became the first virtual chef. The system was programmed to mine recipe datasets for promising ingredient combinations, and to tap into a trove of scientific information about their real-life tastes. There are limits to Watson’s talent; unlike a chef, it cannot instantly recognize a dish gone wrong and tinker to make it work. To address this problem, the IBM engineers collaborated with chefs at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, who brought to life recipes such as Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche, the Austrian chocolate burrito, and Belgian bacon pudding. Together, they finessed the dishes and the algorithms behind them; engineering and abstract reasoning paired with experience, intuition, and inspiration to conceive new flavors. Man and machine forged a creative bond.

  • • •

  The connective tissue for many of the best food pairings is umami, which creates synergies between diverse tastes and smells, making thin flavors robust. Umami brings together the bitter and acid tang in cheeses and accounts for the fortifying sensation of chicken soup. This versatility is the reason food companies have embraced it—or rather, its chemical variant monosodium glutamate—as an all-purpose flavoring and salt substitute. But as a taste to be cultivated and crafted, brought fully to bear on the problem of deliciousness, umami remained mostly in the province of Asian cuisine. This couldn’t last forever. Umami’s flavor may be elusive, but science has exposed its potency; as a basic taste it is biologically similar to sweetness, offering a direct route to the brain’s pleasure centers. In the past decade, Western cuisine has received a large umami infusion, and it has started to alter the flavor maps.

  Umami wasn’t identified as a possible basic taste until 1907. Kikunae Ikeda, then a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University, gradually became convinced there was a mysterious, extra taste orchestrating the flavors in his customary lunch of kombu dashi, a brothy soup made from dried kelp and katsuobushi. So he purchased twenty-five pounds of kelp and set out to isolate it. Chopping, brewing, and distilling the papery greenish stuff, he was eventually able to precipitate glutamate, a salt of an amino acid, a building block of proteins. Ikeda published a paper on his discovery in a Japanese journal, but it received little attention in the West. It took ninety years before umami receptors were identified. Then, in 2005, Adam Fleischman was eating a hamburger from In-N-Out Burger, the popular Los Angeles–based chain that serves thick slabs of ground beef. The word “umami” popped into his head. It rolled off the tongue, languid and exotic. It didn’t seem immediately related to the all-American fare he was eating. But of course, it was: burgers are rich in umami.

  Fleischman had heard the word in the culinary circles he traveled as the part-owner of two L.A. wine bars, BottleRock and Vinoteque, and also read about it in cookbooks by Heston Blumenthal and other chefs who were integrating it into their creations. “I was trying to isolate what made burgers, and pizza, so craveable,” he said. “You put burgers and pizza and nine other dishes in front of people, and 80 percent of the time they’ll go for the burger or pizza.” Umami was a common and underappreciated element. Fleischman decided to add still more to concentrate the savory effects.

  He visited the Mitsuwa Marketplace, a Japanese supermarket, in Santa Monica, and loaded up on umami-heavy ingredients: soy, miso, fish sauce, kombu dashi. He retreated to his kitchen and spent hours mushing them together with ground beef and pork in different combinations, with add-ons such as Parmesan, another umami-intensive food. By late that evening, as he tells it, he had created an “umami burger.”

  Fleischman cashed out his stake in the wine bars and used the money to start a new restaurant. The timing was good; umami’s big moment had arrived. Most people will never hear about the microbial communities growing in the Momofuku Lab, though the umami-heavy flavors they produce might wend their way into the food culture. But Fleischman had positioned himself at the crest of a rising flavor trend as it began to reach a wider public. “The audience for food is so much more sophisticated today than it was ten years ago because they’ve seen these shows, they know what goes into cooking, and they’re curious,” he said. “They want to know about how you’re doing it.” Umami was becoming a concept, a brand. Like “Coke,” “umami” taps into the power the brain’s cognitive functions have over taste and choice; the word suggests something mysterious, rich, and beguiling. Legally, the basic tastes are generic terms, and the US Patent and Trademark Office is skeptical of attempts to obtain exclusive rights to use them. But Fleischman managed to secure the rights to “umami burger” and “umami café,” and has mostly kept the name to himself.

  Savoriness and novelty proved a potent combination: over five years, Fleischman opened twenty restaurants across Los Angeles, the San Francisco area, New York, and Miami Beach. He planned to scale up to 150. “We want to expand globally,” he said, “not like McDonald’s, with one on every corner, but every city will have maybe three.” There are Umami Burger seasonings, sauces, and T-shirts, and a spin-off make-your-own-pizza chain.

  The standard umami burger has eight known sources of its signature taste: beef, Parmesan, tomato, shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, an umami sauce, some umami spice powder, and ketchup. But it’s not intended to be an umami sledgehammer. A rich sensation envelops the palate, yet it has none of the thickness of fat; it’s gentler, leaving space for other flavors to play. “If something is all umami, it doesn’t taste good,” Fleisch­man said. “People aren’t eating just straight kombu or straight anchovies, but they love anchovies layered in other dishes, like a meat sauce. The science was umami; the art was figuring out how to balance it so it worked together in a package.”

  But the umami burger also seems to contradict a basic principle of deliciousness and most twenty-first-century food. Umami is about harmony, not contrast; comfort, not provocation. An umami burger doubles, triples, quadruples those qualities. The hamburger, Fleischman said, isn’t really the object, as it is in other burger joints. It’s a sturdy, familiar vessel that takes diners on an umami trip.

  • • •

  In the quest among chefs, foodies, and food corporations to beguile and seduce, an appreciation for individual flavors is lost. There is too much choice, too much contrast, too much pungency, sweetness, and savoriness. Lior Lev Secarz makes spice blends and delicately flavored cookies in his New York shop, La Boîte. The day-to-day flavor experiences of friends and customers in America distressed him. An old boss of his who visited Japan regularly told him that after he arrived in Tokyo, it usually took three days to shake the daily sensory bombardment of American food and clear his palate enough to savor light, subtle dishes such as sushi. “We drink sodas, we drink liquors, we eat hot spicy food, very acidic food. We drink a lot of coffee,” Secarz said. “Our tongues, our palates are destroyed. If I was to serve you a very delicate broth with some lemongrass and a piece of raw bonito in it in America, you’d say, ‘Where is the Tabasco or A.1. sauce?’ Because you cannot taste anything. But if you were living in Japan, you’d think this was the most flavorful thing that you’ve ever experienced.”

  Secarz, who was raised in Israel and trained as a chef in France before turning to spices, is something of an anomaly in a culinary world where machines and molecular reactions are ascendant. He uses a mortar and pestle, bowls, and measuring cups, and his own senses and intuition, to make new flavors from spi
ces that have been in use for thousands of years. “We are getting to the point where it’s very hard to distinguish yourself in the cooking industry,” he said. “Most things have been done, and what people realize more and more is that you don’t necessarily need to invent something new, or have fireworks. If you can serve a good, honest, flavorful food, serving the best ingredients, this is where you can make your statement.”

  His storefront shop in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood smells like a medieval souk on the Silk Road, full of pepper and coriander. Customers are guided by the aromas—most don’t bother to taste-test the spices; a sniff is enough.

  The shop is closed in the mornings, and Secarz works alone. He spends part of his time on the Internet, scouring prices and markets for supplies; his blends braid strands of flavor from different parts of the world. “Spices are produce,” he said. “They grow somewhere, and somebody is spending a lot of time working so we can have them. There’s better years, worse years.” Often spices dry up due to natural disasters or upheavals, or for economic reasons. Civil war in Syria had cut off the best supply of cumin, forcing him to look elsewhere. He was getting coriander from Canada because his preferred source, India, kept most of it for its domestic market.

  Blending begins with an idea. Sometimes it emerges from a particular need. Sometimes Secarz tries to build on a new ingredient he’s found. He writes a list of possible ingredients (blends typically contain nine to twenty-three spices; thirteen is the average). He measures each one, and plans how their aromatic and taste elements will layer over one another, and how their colors will mix. Some will be toasted, roasted, or ground. The flavors from a fine grind can be tasted instantly; a coarse one may need to be chewed, releasing flavors in waves. An initial blend, a rough draft, will then undergo a series of tests: “smelling, touching, cooking, baking, making drinks with it, roasting, searing, grilling, frying, oiling.”