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Listening to Vegetables
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 13 September 2008
http://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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