Tasty (22 page)

By subtly adjusting the current's magnitude and frequency, along with temperature, he was able to induce sweet, salty, sour, and bitter sensations directly on the tongue (though not umami). These were crude, but Ranasinghe hoped to refine them, and to develop the means to simulate aromas in hopes of one day creating fully realized virtual flavors. He made digital records of the “tastes,” turning them into sequences of ones and zeroes that could be stored on a computer and transmitted over the Internet. Anyone with a digital lollipop device could download the file and “taste” it himself. As the technology improves, a chef may one day be able to create an entire meal, write its flavors to a digital format like a song or a movie, and share it with the world.

Soylent and virtual tastes separate flavor from food. Tasting and savoring become ends in themselves; a form of rec
reation, play, and art, a feast for the brain and mind without any negative consequences for the body. But can flavor ever truly be liberated from its connection to the body? It draws its power from the gut's metabolic furnace, the call of ancient, implacable drives. Make those redundant, and flavor loses its essence. Taste has wreaked a lot of havoc in the industrial age. But every attempt to undo the damage—to water tastes down or to otherwise trick the senses—has produced unsatisfying results. This is the great catch-22 of flavor. Its great reward is the suggestion of self-indulgence, the whiff of danger from going too far.

CHAPTER 9

The DNA of Deliciousness

O
ne day in 2010, chef David Chang decided to make some
katsuobushi
, the cured fish flakes that are a staple of traditional Japanese cuisine.
Katsuo
means “bonito,” a type of tuna, and
bushi
“pieces” or “shavings.” When placed in broth made with miso, kelp, and tofu,
katsuobushi
turns into delicate, rippling cellophane ribbons. Its complex flavors emerge in a process similar to that used for Icelandic
hákarl
, though more intricate. Thick cuts of bonito are smoked, then inoculated with molds and packed in dry rice. Over a period of months, the molds grow, then desiccate. They are scraped off, only to grow back again. Mold microbes infuse and dine on the fish flesh, making a suite of aromatic molecules that rival those of the subtlest cheeses. Amino acids with a strong umami signature also flourish, harmonizing these diverse flavors. The final product is a solid block, its surface mottled in greens and blues, ready to be grated.

Chang had already mastered this temperamental fermentation process, having made
katsuobushi
for his five Momofuku restaurants in New York City. But now he was in the Momofuku Culinary Lab, a cramped, 250-square-foot working
kitchen whose sole purpose was experimenting—­playfully—with culinary tradition.

Chang and his two partners, chefs Dan Felder and Daniel Burns, debated how to alter this particular recipe. They could fiddle around the margins—adjusting the heat applied during the drying and aging process, perhaps—or they could do something truly subversive and substitute pork for fish. In traditional Japanese kitchens, where
katsuobushi
has been made for three hundred years, this idea would be a culinary oxymoron. They chose to go with it.

As a practical matter, swapping out fish for pork made sense. Bonito and bluefin tuna, which is also used to make
katsuobushi
, are expensive and overfished. In Japan, bluefin tuna are so prized and in such short supply that some have been auctioned for over $1 million apiece. Pork is cheap and plentiful, and pigs can be raised organically. If the partners' experiment worked, they would have a provocative take on a Japanese standard, save money, and minimize environmental harm.

They steamed, smoked, and dried a pork tenderloin, then packed it in raw sushi rice to age. No molds were added; they let the microorganisms on the meat grow instead. Six months later, the aged and petrified pork looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, layered with greens, whites, and coppers—in regular
bushi
preparation, a sign of success. They dubbed their concoction
butabushi
, substituting the Japanese word for pork. But as they were about to taste the finished product, they realized they had a serious problem.

Using pork had seemed like a straightforward ingredient swap, but the process of making
katsuobushi
is rigorously managed, all variables accounted for, the result of centuries of trial and error. By introducing an unknown element, they had pro
foundly altered the microbiology of that process. The chefs did not know the identity of the molds growing on their cured pork block. They could be toxic, a threat to public health. Even if benign, they could infect ingredients they came in contact with in the kitchen. Even the best-case ­scenario—that the
butabushi
was safe and its flavor good—was a chef's worst nightmare: they wouldn't know how to re-create it. Natural microbial communities are like snowflakes: each is unique. A different piece of pork would have its own distinctive population of microbes. Even if the molds were identical, small changes in temperature or humidity could influence them in unknown ways, producing wildly different flavors at the end of the aging process. The chefs could duplicate every variable exactly, but the result might never be the same.

• • •

Humans mastered fermentation thousands of years ago, but the scientific understanding of it is still in its infancy. The origins can be traced back to 1856, when thirty-four-year-old Louis Pasteur was dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lille, in France's northern industrial heartland. The father of one of his students, a local distiller named Bigo, approached him with a problem: the spirits he was making from sugar beets were mysteriously turning sour. He invited Pasteur to come and inspect the vats, drawing him into one of the major scientific debates of the era. Some doubted that the yeast that powered alcoholic fermentation was alive, maintaining the process was purely a chemical reaction. Others believed that yeast consisted of tiny organisms that sprang to life fully formed from rotting food and corpses, a process called “spontaneous generation.”

Pasteur literally plunged into the challenge that Bigo had
presented to him. “Louis . . . is now up to his neck in beet juice. He spends all his days at the distillery,” his wife and lab assistant, Marie Pasteur, wrote to her father-in-law. He chemically analyzed the sour gunk from the vats. It contained lactic acid, the chemical that gives spoiled milk its unpleasant taste. Through a microscope, he examined samples taken from both good and bad batches. The good ones were swarming with yeasts. In the bad ones, no yeasts were present, but a smaller, rod-shaped organism was multiplying. Pasteur prepared a solution mixing the two. The rod microbes made more acid, which killed off the yeasts. Pasteur had discovered two distinct processes under way in the vats. The first was the intended one: yeasts making alcohol. The second was basically an infection. Bacteria were producing lactic acid—key in techniques for making cheese and yogurt, but inimical to brewing. Fermentation, it seemed, consisted of organisms living, digesting, and reproducing. The two major theories had both been wrong.

Pasteur's adventure was the beginning of modern microbiology, the study of minute organisms ubiquitous in nature. Among them are bacteria, protozoa, algae, and fungi, including yeasts. Pasteur went on to make a series of scientific breakthroughs that exposed the hidden world of microbes and their role in diseases. He established the modern understanding of germs and vaccinations, which have eliminated or controlled many once ubiquitous infectious diseases such as polio and smallpox, saving tens or hundreds of millions of lives over the past century. But despite Pasteur's continuing interest in beverage making (he wrote a book titled
Studies on Fermentation: The Diseases of Beer, Their Causes, and the Means of Preventing Them
), the field has fallen far short in one respect: very little is known about how microbes make flavor. Compared to the
threat posed by disease, there has never been much urgency to study the benign biological underpinnings of cheeses or beers.

Which is why places such as the Momofuku Lab, which tease apart traditional techniques to see what makes them work, are so important. That effort is part of a broader reinvention of cuisine that is under way in restaurants and artisanal venues around the world, in which science and technology meld with old-fashioned kitchen intuition to push flavor into new domains.

This trend owes a lot to molecular gastronomy, a culinary movement that recasts cooking as chemistry. Conceived by Hervé This and physicist Nicholas Kurti, molecular gastronomy began in the 1980s, as This collected homespun cooking advice from a variety of sources—eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century cookbooks, kitchen lore, old wives' tales—and tested it in a laboratory, often the first time such conventional wisdom had been scrutinized scientifically. One of these truisms, which he called “culinary precisions,” was the notion that the skin of a suckling pig crackles more if the head is chopped off immediately after roasting, which This traced to a book by the eighteenth-century French gastronome Alexandre-­Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière. To test this ­nostrum—which he thought unlikely to work—This roasted four suckling pigs in a public experiment. To assure consistency, the pigs came from the same litter and had been reared on the same farm. They were cooked over a large outdoor fire for five hours. Two of the four heads were cut off, and members of the audience were invited to do a blind comparison. The skin of the headless pigs was, indeed, crispier. As This studied their carcasses, he realized why: when the pigs came off the fire, moisture evaporating from their flesh satu
rated and softened the skin. With the head cut off, the vapor escaped and the skin remained crispy.

In the 1990s and 2000s, This gathered scientists and chefs in a series of workshops to discuss the chemistry and physics of cooking, and how these could alter tastes, but also the body, brain, and mind. They began to experiment with both ingredients and the physical processes of baking, braising, frying, and microwaving to create new dishes that stimulated the senses in unexpected ways. This employed liquid nitrogen to make ice cream (rapid cooling produces a uniformly smooth texture) and calculated the perfect temperature to cook an egg (149 degrees Fahrenheit solidifies the white while leaving the yolk soft and smooth). Drawing inspiration from these meetings, haute chefs began to set up their own culinary labs. They juxtaposed unconventional ingredients and emphasized surprise. Spanish chef Ferran Adrià's dishes included mango juice “spherified”—flash-frozen into a sphere—with a kind of salt obtained from algae until it looks like an egg yolk or caviar, and Parmesan cheese spun to the consistency of cotton candy.

“The act of eating engages all the senses as well as the mind,” wrote chefs Adrià of Catalonia's elBulli, Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in Bray, England, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry in California's Napa Valley, and the esteemed food science writer Harold McGee. Their 2006 manifesto was an audacious attempt to map a twenty-first-century understanding of deliciousness in eight hundred words. The highest aim of cooking, they wrote, is to bring happiness and contentment. The way to do this is to mesmerize the senses, but in an era of sensory overload and networked information, the usual cooking techniques and traditions, not to mention the secrecy long associated with methods and recipes, no lon
ger work. “Preparing and serving food could therefore be the most complex and comprehensive of the performing arts. To explore the full expressive potential of food and cooking, we collaborate with scientists, from food chemists to psychologists, with artisans and artists (from all walks of the performing arts), architects, designers, industrial engineers. We also believe in the importance of collaboration and generosity among cooks: a readiness to share ideas and information, together with full acknowledgment of those who invent new techniques and dishes.”

As early humans learned to manipulate flame and create the first recipes, flavor became the first crucible for culture. Today, deliciousness at its peak is an art form at the bleeding edge of high culture, a gateway to the sublime. The mysterious core of its creation, elaborate chemical reactions and the pulse of microbial life, makes it intrinsically more complex than art, music, writing, or filmmaking. Microbiology, genetic research, and neuroscience are making new tools available to shape sensory experiences, and to challenge and reinvigorate culinary traditions. Such efforts are ambitious, but also necessarily smaller in scale than the technologies overtaking the food industry. They're also influential: since they inherited the mantle of high cuisine from the kitchens of royal courts in the nineteenth century, top-flight restaurants have, directly or indirectly, molded what everyone eats. Julia Child brought elite French cooking to a mass American TV audience; chain restaurants borrow the showy presentations of the elite. If the unusual dynamics of fermentation could be tamed by one test kitchen, others would follow.

The potentially hazardous nature of their moldy pork did not deter the chefs at the Momofuku Lab. “Failure is our bread and butter,” said Felder, who was the lab's director from
2012 to 2014. Mistakes cracked open the culinary process, revealing how individual elements functioned, or failed to. To see if they had indeed failed, Felder sent
butabushi
mold samples to Rachel Dutton, a fellow at Harvard's Center for Systems Biology who studied the behavior and genetics of fungi and bacteria. Dutton cultured the
butabushi
molds and extracted their DNA. She ran it through a gene sequencer, then compared the results to a database of known microbial DNA. The sample contained six species of fungi and two of bacteria. To everyone's relief, none of them was dangerous. But the results were odd. She had expected to find
Aspergillus oryzae
, known to play an important role in
katsuobushi
's flavor profile.
Aspergillus oryzae
is the mold in
koji
, the rice concoction used in Japanese cuisine. Instead, a wild fungus named
Pichia burtonii
predominated. It wasn't something ordinarily found in raw or cured meat. “We don't honestly know where it came from,” Felder said. “Whether it was just in the atmosphere or in the kitchen.”

The term “terroir” refers to the distinct sense of place that imprints itself on grapes, and ultimately on the flavor of wine: the lay of land and sea, the climate, changing patterns of winds and humidity, the soil chemistry. This includes the influence of the microbiome, the teeming universe of microbes that covers nearly everything in nature, whose composition varies mile to mile, yard by yard, and season to season. Any fermented food has its own terroir
,
and the
Pichia
fungus would carry a distinctive flavor imprint from the lab's geographical location—lower Manhattan. The partners did not know what this would be like; city-bred microbes could yield terrible tastes. But when they tasted the
butabushi
, its flavor was good: savory, smoky, and funky like the fish version, but distinctly porky, too.

The
Pichia
discovery was a potential watershed. If its flavor-­making abilities could be harnessed and exploited, along with those of other distinctly New York microbes, Momofuku could create American forms of Japanese cuisine instead of merely tinkering with the originals. It had taken ancient people centuries to tame microbes; now science might allow them to accomplish the task in months.