molecules redux

Since I had recently rambled about this subject, I had to follow up with this post. The freakonomics blog on the NYTimes had a recent podcast titled:
"Waiter, There’s a Physicist In My Soup" about food and the science of food - the first episode being focused on molecular gastronomy.

Some of the comments were very interesting and captured the range of views on this kind of cooking. "vacuum compressed heirloom tomato" ?? crazy cool, but why ?!?!
Part of the recent excitement stems from the release of this encyclopedic venture on Modernist Cuisine chronicling all kinds of wild experiments with food and cooking. I wonder if the Richmond Pubic Library will buy this book. The website has some cool pictures.

I was thrilled to discover that an 2° acquaintance/colleague at Carnegie Mellon - Department of Chemistry teaches what he calls The Kitchen Chemistry sessions - food and molecular cuisine to teach chemistry and science. What a concept ! something I will seriously consider working on. But first, I need to find a partner in this enterprise !

Addendum: Harvard's famous "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter" last fall was in the news last year. Now most of the lectures are on Youtube. A fabulous chance to see how some of the great culinary minds of our time meet with great science (the speaker list was mindblowing!).

In case anyone is interested - A 2010 paper in Chemical Reviews makes for some um...interesting reading on the subject of the chemistry of food:
Molecular Gastronomy: A New Emerging Scientific Discipline - Peter Barham,Leif H. Skibsted, Wender L. P. Bredie, Michael Bom Frøst, Per Møller, Jens Risbo, Pia Snitkjær and Louise Mørch Mortensen
(the pdf is free !) link to paper

As always, the disclaimer - like many of my posts, this is just a repository of food things I am learning/trying to not forget and hopefully someone else might be interested too. It is not intended to be an exercise in bombast.