Tag: Charles Spence

💎 How Noma surprise diners and create a peak moment

4.5.3 Camouflage

“Your first two courses are already on the table.” Yes, that’s what the diners are told by the waiter at Noma after being seated. This all seems very strange however, as there is nothing on the table. Well, nothing that is other than a collection of plant pots in the center (the clue being the fact that there are exactly as many flowerpots as there are diners at the table). The diner is expected to bring the pot closer and then to start digging with nothing else but their hands into the ‘soil’, eating everything they find, including the roots! This starter, camouflaged as it is in a terracotta flower pot, consists of carrots and radishes planted in a dark brown, crunchy edible mixture of malt and hazel· nut flour (which gives a pretty good visual impression of soil) and a greenish yoghurt-based sauce lying at the very bottom (see Figure 4.9a). As a friend who was lucky enough to try this dish put it: “The crunch malt crumble hit the palate followed by the creamy dip and the spicy and fresh crunchy radish. It was a good harvest.” This dish, in the way that it is presented and in the given hidden conceptual incongruity as we’ll discuss in Chapter 7.

Excerpt from: The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining by Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, Charles Spence and Heston Blumenthal

💎 On how poor our recollection of taste can be (how context alters it)

It turns out that we actually have surprisingly little recollection (or awareness) of even that which we tasted only a few moments ago. In one classic demonstration of this phenomenon, known as ‘choice blindness’, shoppers (nearly 200 of them) in a Swedish supermarket were asked whether they would like to take part in a taste test.13 Those who agreed were then given two jams to evaluate. They were similar in terms of their colour and texture (e.g., blackcurrant versus blueberry). Once the shoppers had picked their favourite, they sampled it once again and said why they had chosen it, and what exactly made it so much nicer than the other jam. The shoppers were more than happy to oblige, regaling the experimenter with tales of how it was their favourite, or that it tasted especially good spread on toast, etc.

What many of the shoppers failed to notice, though, was that the jams had been switched before they tasted their ‘preferred’ spread the second time around. The experimenter was using double-ended jam jars in order to effect this switch unnoticed. In other words, the unsuspecting customers were justifying why they liked the spread that they had just rejected.

Excerpt from: Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence

💎 On strongest memory of taste tending to be the first bite (olfactory change blindness)

We are all in a constant state of ‘olfactory change blindness’. Intriguingly, this is something that the food companies have been trying to exploit to their, and hopefully our, advantage for a few years now. The basic idea is that you load all the tasty but unhealthy ingredients into the first and possibly last bite of a food, and reduce their concentration in the middle of the product, when the consumers are not paying so much attention to the tasting experience. Just think about a loaf of bread with the salt asymmetrically distributed towards the crust. The consumer will have a great-tasting first bite, and then their brain will ‘fill in’ the rest by assuming that it tastes exactly like the first mouthful did. This strategy will probably work just as long as the meal isn’t high tea and the taster eating cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off! Or imagine something like a bar of chocolate, which most people will presumably start and finish at the ends, not in the middle. In fact, Unilever has a number of patents in just this space.

Excerpt from: Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence