Consider the orange. Citrus sinensis. Its fleshy, segmented fruit has a tight-fitting skin and contains at least 300 different chemicals. It is not easy to grow. It takes about 13 gallons of water. The fruit only ripens on the tree before it’s picked. And since they’re only grown in six states, oranges are either packed and shipped to places where citrus doesn’t grow or processed into one of America’s favorite breakfast drinks: orange juice.
The only way I could grow an orange tree would be to turn my garden into a palace of plastic that might resemble a Christo & Jeanne Claude sculpture and ask for a huge tax break on my utility bills. But a new website called Carbonfoodprint is trying to provide all-natural alternatives to high carbon-footprint flavors from ingredients right in your backyard. By using knowledge of molecular gastronomy, the theory goes, one can find locally available flavors that, in the right combination, taste like an orange.
Bernard Lahousse, the man behind carbonfoodprint (who is also the project manager at The Flemish Primitives and a food scientist at Sense for Taste), has created an online flavor thesaurus that graphs the volatile compounds in foods. One use for this resource is inspiring chefs to play with unusual combinations of foods based on what they have in common at a molecular level. While that application of molecular gastronomy veers off into the culinary avant-garde, carbonfoodprint has the potential to change the world. Or at the very least, cut the carbon associated with our oranges.
Lahousse charted the 10 key components of an orange in a sunburst diagram. Each color stands for a key flavor component and using the right combination of other ingredients, one could create the taste of an orange without actually using an orange.
His “orange” recipe calls for:
- 20 grams of groundcherry (also known as husk cherries or Physalis)
- 10 grams of melon
- 5 grams gooseberry
- 3 seeds of coriander
- 1 juniper berry
Lahousse’s latest project makes it clear that molecular science is not merely smoke and mirrors and frivolous foams. It can also be about the possibility of reinterpreting the lime flavor with cilantro and lemon grass, re-imagining cranberries when a recipe calls for lemons, or unlocking the secret to fried bacon in basmati rice, strawberry, and black tea. For those who want to eat local and seasonal but don’t want to give up whole swaths of flavors, food science may have found a solution. - GOOD
Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956
