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The Great Aussie Barbecue
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Oxford U.K., 8–10 July, 20111
The Aussie barbecue is a unique celebratory institution. From humble beginnings, with meat cooked on a ploughshare over an outback campfire, or on a shovel in the firebox of a steam locomotive, the Aussie barbecue has now reached iconic status. It forms the focus of many of our national and personal celebrations. To give just one example, the 2009 award of “Australian of the Year” at the National Parliament House in Canberra on Australia Day was accompanied by a barbeque for some 650 invited VIPs where “chefs manned barbeques cooking Australian produce - beef, lamb, chicken, seafood and vegetables.” According to organizer Nicole Lieschke, the 2010 award ceremony followed a similar pattern, with 8 chefs manfully manning four giant barbecues. Even more impressively, the Queen was farewelled from her 2011 visit to Australia with a giant barbecue attended by over 100,000 people, where more than 600 volunteers cooked over 130,000 sausages, with celebrity chefs contributing their own barbecued dishes for the royal visitors...(full text will appear in the published proceedings).
www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/the-symposium.html
Fermented, cured and smoked: The science and savour of dry-fermented sausages
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, July 2010
Vegetable Acoustics and the Carrot Clarinet
Financial Times, 17 January 2009
A talk with the above title which I gave in September 2008 at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/index.html), attracted some media attention. The talk was filmed and will form part of a forthcoming BBC4 TV series on the life and work of symposium founder Alan Davidson. An article featuring the talk (and the clarinet) subsequently appeared in the Financial Times on 17 January 2009.
Listening to Vegetables
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 13 September 2008
www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/programme.html
In this talk I will explore the strange world of vegetable acoustics, from the sounds that tell us how fresh a vegetable is when we tap it to the use of vegetables as musical instruments.
All in the Best Possible Taste – A Talk with Tastings
A talk delivered to the local branch of the Society for Chemical Industry at the University of Cambridge, 15 May 2008
www.soci.org/SCI/sections/cam/2008/reports/html/gs3969.jsp
This entertaining lecture (which I am often asked to repeat at other venues) introduces some surprising facts about food and flavour, with the audience doing the testing.
Scientists and Food - Moral, Immoral or Amoral?
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, September 2007
www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/programme.html
Has the application of science been good or bad for gastronomy?
Molecular Gastronomy – The Science of Good Eating
University of Singapore, August 2006
A highly successful talk for a general audience, comparing the science of cooking in East and West, with examples of dishes created by leading chefs in Singapore and London.
 The Science of Toffee Apples
Royal Institution, London, 5 November 2005
A talk geared for families, with demonstrations and tastings, on the science behind the lowly toffee apple - not to mention the toffee-coated sausage and the toffee banana!
Food for Thought
Broadmead Baptist Church, Bristol, Oct–Dec 2004
A series of four public talks (with demonstrations) on using science in the kitchen, (presented in collaboration with Dr Peter Barham).
What Goes With What? How Food Flavours Affect Each Other
Badock Hall, University of Bristol, June 2004
Fat and Flavour (with Philadelphia chef Fritz Blank)
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, St Antony’s College, Oxford, Sept 2002
The talk comprised two sections. The first was a brief scientific introduction (strictly for non-scientists!) outlining how oil-soluble flavour materials become distributed in the oily and fatty parts of a dish during preparation and cooking, and how these materials are released to the tastebuds on the tongue and palate and to the aroma receptors at the back of the nose as the food is eaten.
In the second part of the talk chef Fritz Blank took the audience through some tasting guides that he had prepared for different dishes (with practical examples and audience participation) while Len Fisher explained what was happening at a scientific level as the dish is chewed, savoured and swallowed, focussing on the role of fat in flavour release.
Taste Interactions
Bath Wine Tasting Society, October 2000
A talk with tastings about the food, wine and the interaction of their flavours.
Molecular Gastronomy
After-dinner Talk, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, USA, September 2000
The late Nicholas Kurti, Oxford physicist and gastronome, pointed out that man now understands more about the interior of stars than he does about the inside of a soufflé. Aiming to correct this imbalance, he instituted a biennial series of conferences on “Molecular Gastronomy” – the application of science to the gastronomic art - at the Ettore Majorana Centre in Erice, Sicily, more famed for high level conferences on such subjects as high energy physics or the origin of the Universe. Here a group of Michelin-star chefs and a few lucky scientists such as myself (usually with a few Nobelists, bored with their own conferences, thrown in) foregather every two years to toast Nicholas’s memory and to push forward his programme of culinary science. In this talk I will reveal some of the gastronomic secrets that have emerged, and discuss how much science has contributed and may yet have to contribute to the noble art.
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