Food and Flavor Chemistry

In the branch of Food and Flavor Chemistry chemists create new and exciting flavors, as well as enhancing the current flavors, to deliver a new and fascinating experience with everyday food. They also ensure the safety of the food and the corresponding packaging, often working with a governmental agency. Recently, a new branch of Food and Flavor Chemistry has arisen. This is an avant-garde type of cooking known as Molecular Gastronomy. These three fields, combined, make up the heart of what Food and Flavor Chemistry is about, delivering innovative and revolutionary ways to interact with your food, ensuring the safety of the public, and creating new flavors.

In the field Food and Flavor chemistry, Chemists, commonly called “Flavorists”, work on creating new flavors for popular companies such as, Coca-Cola, Doritos and Lay’s. Currently Lay’s is hosting a contest called “Do us a Flavor.” Anyone may enter a flavor, then through the democratic method Lay’s chooses the top four flavors to actually produce. Before Lay’s starts production they send the flavor to their army of Flavorists to develop and perfect the flavors that were submitted. Normally, this process starts with actually cooking or baking the foods that the flavors will be based on so the Flavorists have a taste to aim for. Next, using previous knowledge of what chemicals create certain flavors, they combine these flavors in a sterile environment, then they let them set for an hour to react and meld together. After the Flavorists are satisfied with the flavors, they send samples of the chips out to be field tested. This is another very vital process of a Flavorists job, to ensure that the public will actually consume the product.

Molecular Gastronomists focus on the social, artistic, and technical side of cooking. Molecular Gastronomist use avant-garde techniques to deliver a new and exciting social and artistic experience to eating. One of the most popular techniques is called “Food Spherification.” To create food spheres you must first mix the liquid with a small amount of sodium alginate, then this is dropped into a water/ calcium chloride mixture. The calcium chloride bonds with the sodium alginate to create a thin “skin” around the outside, preserving a liquid center. Other techniques include using, liquid nitrogen, reverse griddle, and many other. Another prominent technique uses agar agar. Chemists figured out that agar agar, based off of seaweed, is a natural gelatinizer that can be used to thicken almost any liquid into a jello type substance. This can be used to make fruit spaghetti noodles for a dessert pasta.

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