WHITE chocolate with caviar, salmon with liquorice, bananas with parsley. Heston Blumenthal started the craze: according to the principles of “molecular flavour pairing” espoused by the UK chef in the early 2000s, these duos were natural platefellows, sharing flavour compounds that suggested explosive taste sensations when combined.
Blumenthal later characterised this as “bumptious enthusiasm”, a folly of youth that overlooked the true complexities of how the thousands of molecules in any foodstuff make flavour. “I now know that a molecule database is neither a shortcut to successful flavour combining nor a fail-safe way of doing it,” he wrote in The Times in 2010. “If I’d known then what I know now, I would probably never have tried this method of flavour pairing.”
Well, we do know now what he didn’t know then. As gastronomic science has continued its remorseless advance, we have gained ever more insights into how chemistry, physiology and perception combine to create sensations of true deliciousness. 91av has always championed evidence-based living, so it was time to put some of these insights to the test.
Advertisement
As good foot soldiers of the festive season, we decided to test them not on food, but on booze. On an unseasonably warm afternoon in early October, a troop of five 91av staff – four thirsty editors and a photographer to record the results – were to be found just off a suburban backstreet in north London with one question on our lips: could science create the ultimate cocktail sensation?
The classic cocktail: The negroni
Take equal measures of gin, Campari and vermouth and mix. Pour over ice and garnish with an orange slice
A key component of any scientific test is the control. Classic cocktail combinations exist for a reason – widespread acclaim – so to calibrate our scoring system for the experimental concoctions to follow, we needed first to sample an acknowledged hit.
Our host for the afternoon, Carlos Chuliá, development chef at , a gastrophysics research outfit and restaurant in Barnet, London, recommended the negroni. This gin-based combination apparently originated in 1919 in a bar in Florence, Italy. “It’s a classic, and good for cleansing the palate,” says Chuliá. Usefully for our critical faculties, it also packs quite a punch.
Verdicts: “Floral on the nose, bitter on the palate.” “An acquired taste.” “You have to like bitter.”
Average score out of five:
Opposites attract: Lemon, pepper and cucumber collins
Fill cocktail shaker with ice, add 10ml Sichuan pepper syrup, 25ml gin, 50ml cucumber juice and 10ml lemon juice. Shake and serve.
For the Sichuan pepper syrup: bring 100ml water, 100g of sugar and 10g of Sichuan pepper to the boil and simmer at medium heat for 5 min. Cool and strain.
Even one drink down, the science behind cocktail recipes was starting to feel less important. Fortunately, one of our number had read the research beforehand and brought it along on a piece of paper.
Controlled experiments weren’t kind to the first iterations of molecular flavour pairing: blind taste tests suggested paired combinations fared no better than unpaired combinations. In 2011, physicist and his colleagues, then at Northeastern University in Boston, gave things a more scientific footing. They used principles of network theory to analyse 56,000 recipes from North America, Europe and Asia, checking to see if the ingredients shared flavour compounds.
They found that recipes from western Europe and North America did, but those . In these places, the tendency seemed to be to combine ingredients with the fewest flavour molecules in common.
Our “opposites attract” cocktail, whipped up by Chuliá, took this discovery as an inspiration. For a variation on the classic gin cocktail, the Tom Collins, he chose three ingredients from very different parts of Ahnert’s flavour network: lemon, cucumber and Sichuan pepper.
And the result was indeed surprisingly pleasant – and nothing like the titanic clash of flavours you might expect.
Verdicts: Thumbs up. “Rushing rivers and watercress.” “Like sitting on a veranda surrounded by English flowers.” “Amazingly mild.” “Where’s the alcohol in it?”
Average score:
The paired cocktail: Beetroot, coffee and aniseed mule
Take 20ml each of vodka and beetroot juice, 10ml each of sambuca and hibiscus kombucha and 5ml cinnamon syrup, pour over ice and mix well. Strain into a glass, then cover with yogurt foam and sprinkle with coffee grounds.
For the yogurt foam: mix 70ml Greek yogurt, 50ml water, 50ml sugar syrup, 20ml egg white and 10ml lemon juice in a blender, pour into a whipped-cream dispenser and charge with two nitrous oxide cartridges.
A deficiency of network-based flavour pairing theory is that it fails to take into account concentrations of flavour molecules or the thresholds at which they must be present for us to perceive them, says Jozef Youssef, the chef-patron of Kitchen Theory. Ahnert says he is now working to incorporate detection thresholds into a new flavour network, though this work is not finished.
While we wait for that breakthrough, we wondered whether there might be a way to get the most out of current flavour pairing know-how, which says that similar-tasting ingredients and very different-tasting ingredients can both complement each other. Could we explode a mega-volcano of cocktail taste? A recipe originally developed for a sambuca manufacturer by , a consultancy in Belgium headed by Peter Coucquyt, gave us an opening.
To build his concoction, Coucquyt, a former chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant, started with the anise-flavoured liqueur sambuca and looked for ingredients with similar flavour molecules that would pair well with it. That led him to beetroot, whose earthy flavour comes from the molecule geosmin. And to coffee, whose similarly earthy notes come from compounds called pyrazines.
But Coucquyt went one further. “When I create, I use food pairing to find the aromatic matches,” he says. “But then you have your experience as a chef too.” That told him that the earthy notes would be beautifully balanced by the mild sour notes of yogurt. Did it work?
Verdicts: Hit the spot. “It socks you with aniseed, but then reveals a whole fulfilling underworld of beetroot.” “Awesome complexity.” “Psychedelic, or is that just the alcohol talking?”
Average score:
Order is everything: The paloma, refreshed
Pour 250ml grapefruit juice, 100ml tequila, 12ml vanilla syrup and the juice of half a lemon into a soda siphon. Add some ice. Charge with one carbon dioxide cartridge, shake and let go. Repeat with a second cartridge. Strain into a glass, then add salt foam on top.
For the vanilla syrup: bring 100ml water, 60g sugar and 8g vanilla extract to the boil. Let it cool, then refrigerate.
For the salt foam: blend 500ml water, 5g salt and 4.3g lecithin with a handheld electric blender, incorporating air into the mix until it foams on top.
If you have ever drunk orange juice just after brushing your teeth, you will have experienced a fundamental truth of flavour perception: order matters. In 2017, Youssef and his long-time collaborator at the University of Oxford, who studies how we perceive food, pointed out that attempts to find new, interesting combinations of flavours have .
“It tastes like sipping out of the washing-up bowl, but I don’t mind it”
Our final cocktail rectified that, abandoning the idea of finding thrilling new flavour combinations and focusing on the ordering of tastes. “We’re following a traditional recipe but freshening it,” says Chuliá, bullishly. “Because this is gonna be better.”
We chose a paloma, a classic long mix of grapefruit soda and tequila traditionally served with salt on the rim of the glass. The salt blocks bitter taste receptors on the tongue, making the grapefruit taste sweeter. In much the same way, sodium lauryl sulphate, a detergent commonly found in toothpaste, blocks sweet receptors, making orange juice taste bitter after brushing.
With a traditional paloma, however, the salt is all gone after a few sips. Chuliá instead mixed up a salt foam and laid it on top of the drink to avoid this problem. “You’re in this continuous loop of salt and grapefruit,” he says. But is that a place where anyone would want to be? It was noses down to find out.
Verdicts: Mixed. “Fresh and consistent.” “Luscious.” “Like sipping out of the washing-up bowl, but I don’t mind it.” “I just don’t like it.”
Average score:
Overall verdict
It was an afternoon of surprises: the complexity of the flavours developed in the beetroot, coffee and aniseed mule, for example, or the floral harmony of the pairing of opposing elements in the lemon, pepper and cucumber Collins.
It may be a measure of the amount of alcohol imbibed that our assessments became more fractious and less consistent as the session wore on. But the fact that all our newfangled cocktail concoctions scored higher than a classic negroni suggests that the appliance of science has much to offer the casual cocktail mixer. They are to be enjoyed in moderation, of course, but do try this at home.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Science, fix me a drink”