Scientific analysis teaches you to find coffee and diet.

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When you cook spaghetti, have you ever wondered why tomatoes are cooked with onions and cheese? Can tomatoes go with coffee? Recently, I have seen some netizens use coconut green to make iced coffee, so is it okay to use garlic to make coffee? Food matching (food pairing) is a new research. Traditionally, chefs match cooking ingredients with experience and taste of food, and wine drinkers also like to participate in wine dinner, matching different foods with wines of different flavors and places of origin. These are more freewheeling and experience-based.

However, in the past decade, human biochemical research has made some remarkable progress. Scientists use the key odor molecules of food to find food that can be matched, and find that food combinations with the same odor components can produce a good flavor. Star chefs, food technologists, sommeliers and so on are all used one after another, but the research on dietary collocation of coffee, a mixed-flavor beverage, is still not common.

How to match the flavor?

All foods contain aromatic molecules, as students who have been on SCA Coffee Sensory know, in fact, the tongue can only eat sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh five "flavors". Of the other flavors in food / coffee, 75% are produced by volatile aromatic compounds received by the nose, and the remaining 5% are produced by the taste and taste of food.

Flavor pairing is the matching of foods with the same aromatic molecules. For example, bananas and pears contain aromatic molecules called isoamyl acetate (isoamyl acetate). On the other hand, tomatoes, cheese and garlic all have the same fishy aroma molecules, adding cheese and garlic, because there are more molecules in cheese and garlic than in tomatoes, and cooking together can mask the fishy smell in tomatoes, thus increasing the sweetness in tomatoes. For example, dessert with shrimp onions, white chocolate with caviar, chocolate with white broccoli, or strawberries with peas, which was never thought of in traditional dishes, turned out to be sandwiched.

Want to know what food goes together? Foodpairing.com 's database contains information on more than 1000 compounds of different vegetables, meat, spices, juices, flowers, etc., which users can easily identify and match.

Drink coffee and drop salt?

If you drink coffee without sugar, is it okay to put salt instead? Taiwan has rock salt caramel coffee. It is said that in Ethiopia, salty popcorn is usually served for 𩠌 coffee. Tim Wendelboe, the 2004 WBC champion, did one such experiment, sprinkling salt on the coffee to test how salt affected the bitterness. In the experiment, 65 grams of coarse ground coffee powder was soaked in 1 liter of hot water, soaked for 5 minutes, stirred and soaked for another 1 minute, then divided the coffee into three parts. The first 300mL coffee is served with about 45mg salt; the second 300mL is added with double 90mg salt, and the last 1/3 is used as a reference. The first observation is that even at 150 mg / L (equivalent to 45 mg / 300 mL), the effect of salt is very obvious. Tim's assessment is that salt makes the coffee lose some flavor structure, less sour and less bitter, but the coffee is richer and thicker.

However, the principle of food blending is still scientifically controversial.

Food can support and hurt people.

There has always been a saying among the Chinese people that eating food that contradicts each other will harm your health, poisoning, and even worry about your life. In fact, in the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, there is indeed a way that food can control each other, and Western nutrition also has taboos such as drugs. Although it is not life-threatening, if there is no way to eat, it will have the opportunity to affect nutritional intake. Many people have heard that spinach cannot be eaten with tofu, which is actually related to the large amount of Oxalic acid in spinach, because when oxalic acid encounters calcium in tofu, the two combine to form insoluble calcium oxalate, which cannot be absorbed by the human body.

Foods rich in tannins (Tannins), such as tea, coffee, red wine, persimmons, etc., have antioxidant properties, but can affect iron absorption. Tannins are very easy to oxidize and easily change into tannins in contact with hot water or air. Tannins solidify after contact with protein, which hinders the intake of protein and has a chance to damage the gastric mucosa. Long-term consumption may cause stomach disease, so you must pay attention to it.

When you design creative coffee in the future, you can consider using analytical chemistry tools to analyze the key odor chemical components shared by different foods, so as to find delicious coffee combinations that have never been found in traditional culture.

Reference materials:

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Article source: courtesy of Vigi Coffee