Peter Barham, Professor of Physics at Bristol University and Molecular Gastronomy at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark came to Badminton to give parents and girls from Year 11 upwards, a talk on the Science of Taste and Flavour. He has worked with Heston Blumenthal on a number of projects and is also a professorial teaching fellow at Bristol University. It was an interesting and amusing evening, and we all learned a lot from Professor Barham. He spoke about a wide range of topics, ranging from the five senses and aroma, to flavour pairing.
One of the most interesting things that I learned from the talk was about the five types of taste receptors our tongues have, and how everybody has a different pattern of taste buds. Another interesting part was learning that you don’t in fact need a pinch of salt when cooking vegetable as many people would tell you, rather this is a hangover from Victorian times when table salt included impurities with calcium in them that can turn tired, brown vegetables green again. During the lecture some lucky (adult!) audience members were called up to do some wine tasting of both red and white wine, little did they know that it was in fact the same white wine, only with food colouring making one glass look red. To the tasters, they tasted different because their minds told them it was different, showing how appearance links to how something tastes.
Towards the end of the talk we were offered samples of firstly honey and cheese, and then blue cheese and dark chocolate. This was to demonstrate how often two foods that one would not expect to go well together, in fact, taste very nice. This is called flavour pairing. From the lecture, we learned how cooking has progressed over the years, and now have a new appreciation of how complicated the science of taste and flavour really is!
Charlotte, Year 10
