The Art and Science of Foodpairing: 10,000 Flavour Matches That Will Transform the Way You Eat

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While the science is intricate and often overwhelming for the non-scientific reader, there is plenty of good, practical information as well. The origin and history of each ingredient is explained, and there are many useful facts. For example: why roasted cauliflower has more flavor than boiled, that chopping garlic changes its aroma, and the reason why your vinaigrette could end up bitter. As well, there are offbeat nuggets like why and how Nutella was invented.

The most successful food pairings strike a carefully measured balance between complexity and coherence. As humans, we crave variety, yet we also seek out familiar elements or structures that help us make sense of novel experiences. This aesthetic principle of “unity-in-variety,” as coined by the psychologist Daniel Berlyne, satisfies our curiosity and desire for learning while also allowing the disparate elements to be efficiently processed in ways we deem pleasurable.The science behind this book is complex, based on the importance of our sense of smell to the flavor of everything we eat and drink. Most people associate the flavor of their food with taste, yet all of us have endured tasteless food when we have a head cold. Eighty percent of the flavor of food comes from its smell. Our sense of smell is so sensitive, that we are able to differentiate at least one trillion different scents. Foodpairing(R) has the potential to transform our food choices with outcomes that include good health as well as the power to alleviate boredom. The same dinner, the same staples. We get bored, our children get bored. Foodpairing(R), even without adding anything new to the pantry, can alleviate that. Foodpairing(R) - What it is, how it works, methodology; the database; how to create a well-balanced recipe.

The length and/or height of each wavy band of color indicates the concentration of an aroma type present. Food pairing makes it easy to discover new ingredient combinations based on their aromatic matches, but that is not all there is to creating tantalizing dishes that will pique your palate. What can you do to take your recipes to the next level? As you make your selections, don’t forget to factor in taste and texture. Balancing the elements of flavor (aroma), taste and texture will add interesting depth and dimension to your dishes. Striking the right balance may sound simple in theory, but it is often the most difficult part of the job when you are in the kitchen. The basics in brief Some ingredients are represented by small aroma wheels, which convey the key aroma descriptors in a simplified form. How to read a pairing grid The Art and Science of Foodpairing provides a fascinating, thought provoking, palette-teasing read for anyone interested in food.”

I think this book has a lot of interesting information but as a professional Food Scientist who specializes in the sensory properties of food, I wish the author had gone about this differently. Summary: This is good if you are very into food and mixing together random stuff. For those that do this naturally, it's a nice reiteration, but not earth shattering. For those that can only use a recipe, this may be quite a bit more insightful as to why there are those that don't need one. I think that the 150 food matrices that IBM's Watson used to group based on the compounds found within each food is interesting. It shows us good pairings and also substitutes. The author, James Briscione, also describes many of the scientific portions of this book well and will remind you that he is not a scientist but a chef. He also includes interesting recipes after each food matrix.

Aroma - Including the importance of aroma to our flavor experience; how we change aromas by cooking; how ingredients create different or similar results; building your aroma library. The flavor matrix” book does contain some recipes; however, the recipes are a little too exotic for everyday use. But say we add almonds and basil to our chocolate dessert: suddenly, Group B becomes more complex, as we now have five contrasting ingredients to balance in terms of taste and texture. One way to get around the issue of too many items overcrowding the plate is to limit yourself to just a few ingredients that offer a diverse range of contrasting profiles. The next time you’re in creative mode be sure to pull this book off the shelf and read it for inspiration.Allium sativum first originated in the Central Asian regions of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where nomads collected the wild bulbs to take with them on their travels and plant elsewhere. Instead of being grown from seed, garlic was propagated asexually throughout much of history by simply planting the cloves or entire bulbs; only in the past few hundred years have growers employed selective breeding in the domestication of the garlic crop. These days, there are many varieties of garlic, and it is used widely in many cultures. It features prominently in Mediterranean sauces such as aioli, allioli, pesto, skordalia, persillade and gremolata. Why chopping garlic changes its aroma Once the food enters your mouth, chewing it releases yet more aromatic compounds, over a thousand individual compounds may be found in a single bite." In Flavor Matrix, the team of authors, James Briscione and Brooke Parkhurst have fashioned a visually stunning book that suggests flavor pairings of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and other protein sources with other fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, etc., and also with herbs and spices, liquids, etc. Crafted for ambitious home cooks, chefs-in-training and food writers, a wealth of food data fits into a graphic image which I think of as a flavor wheel. The wheel displays at a glance the top choices for numerous variations or possibilities on a single ingredient. Salty - it's just complementary to everything but sour and bitter (seems wrong to me) (no balancing) A little sweet, salty, and spicy can make for an ace taste-bud combination. Dhaya Eddine Bentaleb/Unsplash SHARE

When humans taste a food, they are processing its taste 80 percent through the nose -- via the food's aromatic molecules -- and only 20 percent on the tongue. We can conclude then that knowing the aromatic molecular properties of a food is critical to pairing foods successfully for ultimate taste.This exciting new book explains why the food combinations we know and love work so well together (strawberries + chocolate, for example) and opens up a whole new world of delicious pairings (strawberries + parmesan, say) that will transform the way we eat. With ten times more pairings than any other book on flavour, plus the science behind flavours explained, Foodpairing will become THE go-to reference for flavour and an instant classic for anyone interested in how to eat well.