Last year at South by Southwest, one of our editors was lucky enough to taste a kebab designed by IBM's Chef Watson. This year, my stomach grumbled--the only food in sight was an assortment of images projected onto a screen--while a panel explained how Watson became so good at creating offbeat recipes and inspiring professional and home chefs.
Whether you prefer pumpkin, apple, or chocolate, you probably agree that pie is already amazing. But it can be made even better by carefully engineering the eating experience. Enjoying food is much more than just taste; sound, smell, sight and texture all play integral roles in how much we enjoy a given food. Popular Science talked with Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Somerville College in England, who studies the psychology and sensory experience of eating.
Amy Rowat, a biophysicist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, understands the nuances of pie-making better than anyone. For four years, she's tinkered with the quintessential American dessert to teach chemistry and physics to students. Here, Amy explains the science behind the art.
We haven't tasted it yet, but we love it already. A team of graduate students at Cornell University created a tofu-like product made entirely with protein taken from mealworms, the Cornell Daily Sun reports. The product is called 'c-fu,' which combines the Chinese word for curd—"to-fu" in Chinese means "bean curd"—with the letter "C" because the original c-fu was made with cricket proteins. However, in the spirit of improvement, the team later found that mealworm-fu is tastier than cricket-fu.
In the kitchen, we're much more familiar with acids than we are with alkaline ingredients. Acids include vinegar, lemon juice--all kinds of things that we use to brighten foods or add sourness. Acid ingredients are also found in everyday fermented foods, like yogurt. Alkalinity's a little more unusual.
Bad news, trick-or-treaters: A new recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) deals a serious blow to your annual candy binge. The guideline, set to be released this fall, drops the suggested daily intake of “free sugars”—those added to processed foods, such as high-fructose corn syrup, and those that result when naturally occurring sugars are refined, as with maple syrup.