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In Praise of Coriander

As someone with a creative bent, I want to make sure I have access to the widest possible range of flavors to work with, just as an artist would want to have a lot of colored paints at hand. Some seasonings have very specialized uses and stay in the cabinet, but others are used so often I keep them on a rack right above the cooktop. Most herbs and spices are best suited either for savory foods or sweet ones. A few, like ginger, have shape-shifting characters that lets them do dual duty. Of these, coriander is the king in my kitchen.

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“White peaches” — An Interview with Wine Economist Robin Goldstein

I was a wine and food critic and writer before the Wine Trials (Book: The Wine Trials, a cross-country experiment in blind wine tastings), and was trained as a sommelier. I really felt I was not a snob or a bullshit artist. But after the trials, it became apparent to me that there was absolutely no relationship between wine price and drinker preference, except maybe that most people preferred inexpensive wines to expensive ones.

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An Interview with Flavor Experts Gary Spedding and Tony Aiken

GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”

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Is There a Brain Map for Odors?

GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”

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A Chart of Wine Aroma Impact Molecules

This post deals with the fascinating world of functional fragrance: the commercial art of adding aromas to household products. Since so much money is riding on this, it tends to be highly secretive, and it’s very difficult to get those involved to really tell stories about the tricks and techniques that make these products and deal with our perceptually messy selves. John has moved on to other things, so was happy to share some insights with me.

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Interview with Functional Fragrance Expert John Lenhart

This post deals with the fascinating world of functional fragrance: the commercial art of adding aromas to household products. Since so much money is riding on this, it tends to be highly secretive, and it’s very difficult to get those involved to really tell stories about the tricks and techniques that make these products and deal with our perceptually messy selves. John has moved on to other things, so was happy to share some insights with me.

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G. Lacambre’s Strange Belgian Beers in 1851

Obviously a work this large has a lot in it, so here I’m dealing with a small portion of the book where he describes the beer styles of the day. Early on in the book Lacambre asserts that at that time, just about all (75 percent) beers from Belgium and Holland were wheat (or other adjunct) based beers, even “the ones we call barley beers.” This was prior to the arrival of lagers in Belgium.

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Food and Drink: What Is Really Known About Food and Drink Interactions?

I was involved for a couple of years with a group that was trying to put some logic and science into the often fuzzy thinking around beer and food pairing. I think we made some progress, but one of the things we knew we needed was a literature search. This meant combing through a ton of scientific papers to look for proven interactions, which was not an easy task, since they tended to be buried in research about particular receptors and other biological systems.

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Hidden Taste Systems

Of our chemical senses, taste is the one most of is is probably the most obvious. A sweet, salty, sour or bitter taste on our tongue is quick and unambiguous, although umami and others can be more nuanced. The last thing we would expect is a parallel taste system in our bodies operating entirely behind the scenes.

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