This is not the culinary raving of a madman. I'm actually doing this to test the results
of a somewhat obscure, but fascinating paper on wine and cheese pairings published in 2021. Yes,
there is some actual science behind wine and food pairings, but just how good is that science?
There are some fields in science where we have a pretty good understanding
of how things work and why they work backed by layers of empirical evidence.
Food and wine pairing is not one of those fields. We have some empirical evidence. Yes,
but there's lots and lots and lots of marketing. Most of which is
mostly bull ... Food and wine pairing as a scientific field is both relatively young
and relatively small. Food and wine pairing as a thing that some people do is much older and
there's a ton of accumulated wisdom and personal preference passed down from chef to apprentice
that's generated certain legendary pairings. For example, port wine and Stilton cheese.
That's good. Oh, that's really good.
Accumulated wisdom and personal preference is great, but it's not scientific. It doesn't help
us understand why certain things go so well or so poorly together.
And it also doesn't help us predict new mind blowing matches like olives and peanut butter.
I don't mind that at all.
Really?
I kind like it.
Still in my mouth. The Holy Grail of food and wine pairing would be a framework or a set of
rules for understanding pairings and predicting the results of new ones. Now, most of the rules
that are out there today have no chemical or physical basis whatsoever. There is some
weird stuff out there like this thing. This is apparently called the Flavour Styles Cube,
spelled flavour. I honestly tried to understand what this means and I couldn't do it. I'm sorry.
Then there's something called…Let me find it here. Yes, Umami Synergy,
which was published in a nature journal. I had never heard of the
recommendation that this makes before, which is to eat champagne and oysters.
But I was told later by fancier people that this is actually a legit and classic pairing.
Even IBM got in on this. They designed an algorithm that their supercomputer, Watson,
could use to make recipes. Here is the IBM page. Look at the clip art that they chose
for Watson. Look at that guy. And Chef Watson did get their 15 minutes of internet fame.
Here's the Bon Appetite article, but these days, if you try and click on the link.
Goodbye.
Let's talk about some of the food and wine pairings that do have a solid basis in chemistry.
First, the most famous one, the idea that red wine goes with meat. And white wine goes with
seafood. Somewhat shockingly, this broad and simple rule seems to be the result of one ion,
ferrous iron, FE2+. Now red wines typically have more ferrous iron than white wines do because
they're more likely to come in contact with iron metal during the wine making process.
Most white wines, on the other hand, typically only touch steel, not iron. So they only have
as much iron as was in the grapes. When you mix wines that are high in ferrous ions with fish,
as the authors of this 2009 paper did, you get an unpleasant smell and taste
which has been described as metallic, astringent, bitter and or fishy.
I do want to stop and say, this is actually a really nice paper. Not only did the authors
have people taste actual red wines with various ferrous iron concentrations and
rate the fishiness. They also made a model wine. In other words, a fake wine using ethanol and
a tartrate buffering system. Then they added various concentrations of ferrous iron to this
fake wine and repeated the taste experiments confirming that the more iron was in the wine,
the fishier the scallops tasted. Now the really nice thing about this method is that
the only difference between the fake wines was the iron concentration, which makes it a
beautifully controlled experiment. But they weren't done. Okay. Then they took EDTA,
which binds iron and added various amounts of it to a high iron wine. The more EDTA they added,
the less fishy the scallops tasted. So what is the iron doing exactly?
We don't fully understand the chemistry here, but the authors think that it catalyzes the
breakdown of unsaturated fatty acids in the fish, forming these aldehydes and ketones.
And that's what you smell. Remember, white wine, which has low levels of iron,
wouldn't generate these molecules so no fishy smell. Now the authors only did
this with scallops, but presumably the result would be similar with most fish.
Interestingly, this rule may be less relevant today than in the past.
It turns out that most modern wine makers have switched over to steel in red wine production,
which lowers the ferrous iron concentrations in their wines, which means you can now pair
them with fish and not get that metallic, bitter, fishy taste. And people actually do
recommend pairing some red wines with some fish. Pinot Noir with salmon, for example.
That's really nice. The fattiness of the salmon is cut by the sort of
acidity of the Pinot Noir. It's a nice light wine, heavy fish, goes well together.
This whole story I've been telling you about wine and fish. It's not actually
a food and wine pairing. It's a food and wine, not pairing. It's something to avoid.
Here's another not pairing with a solid chemical basis. As early as 1935 in a paper titled
A Dinner Demonstration of Threshold Differences in Taste and Smell, which is an awesome title,
scientists notice that if you eat an artichoke and then follow it with water, the water tastes sweet,
though this only happens in about 60% of people. Artichokes contain a molecule called cynarin
that binds sweet receptors on your tongue. But the binding is kind of muted. The receptors don't
fire. So at that point, you don't taste anything sweet, but when you follow this with a drink,
could be water, it could be wine, the drink washes away the cynarin and the sweet receptor fires,
making the drink tastes sweeter than it otherwise would. And that's not something you want out of
a wine. So the consensus is if you're going to eat artichokes, do it without wine. It's
sort of similar to what happens with miracle berries, which we made a whole video about.
Now let's get back to this. This is actually a food and drink pairing
that didn't used to have a basis in chemistry and now does. And no, it's not wine and lard.
It's wine and cheese, specifically tannic wines and the fat in cheese, hence the lard.
This paper, which was published in 2021 shows for the first time, how fat from the cheese
interact with the tannins in the wine and how that changes the flavor of the wine.
Tannins are everywhere in nature, including in grape seeds, skin and stems. Now red wines are
usually produced by taking entire bunches of grapes and pressing them, and then leaving this
whole thing to ferment. White wines on the other hand are usually produced by pressing the grapes.
This is harder than it looks. And then
throwing them away and fermenting only the juice. So while red wine grapes are fermenting,
tannins are leaching into the liquid from the seeds, and the stems and the skins. So
red wines usually have much higher levels of tannins than white wines. I am out of shape.
Tannins give you that astringent mouth puckering feeling. Look, it's even in
the title of the paper. Subtitles can't be wrong. Tannins can also be bitter. A little
bit of tannin can be good. Too much tannin can make the wine unpleasant. Now let's talk cheese.
Cheese is an emulsion, millions of tiny fat globules suspended in water. Now, normally
fat and water don't mix so homogeneously, but in cheese's case, they're prevented from separating
by proteins. Okay, and that brings us back to this paper in which the authors did two things.
First, they mixed a tannin together with an oil in water emulsion,
and used a bunch of techniques to watch what happened. The single tannin is meant to represent
the wine and the olive oil in water emulsion is meant to represent the cheese. Now, obviously
wine and cheese are much more complex than this, but this makes it a lot easier to study.
The second thing they did was much simpler. They assembled a panel of taste testers and had them
swish a tablespoon of olive oil around in their mouth, and then take a sip of tannin solution and
describe the taste. So let's look at the results of the second thing first. Olive oil changed the
taste of the tannin solution from astringent to fruity. When I read that I was actually pretty
blown away to the point where I had to try it myself. Okay, so first we taste the wine.
Very tannic. Let's clear the pallet. Dry saltines. Delicious.
Okay. Now, next test. Half olive oil, half wine, same wine.
Oh my God. That's so wild. That tastes like juice. It completely took away
all the tannin. I have to say I was not expecting that. I was expecting some effect, but if I had my
eyes closed, I would never have guessed that I had just put the same wine in my mouth. That is wild.
That is really wild, dude. You have to try this. Tannic wine.
Yep.
Got the mouth pucker.
That's tannic.
Yep.
All right. I'm ready for this to be life altering. Wow.
Okay. Now how is the olive oil doing that? To answer that question, let's look at the
results of the other stuff. So all the methods used pointed to the tannin incorporating itself
into the fat globules like this. Now the yellow glob is olive oil. The DMPC is the emulsifier.
And the red things are the tannins. So essentially this glob of emulsified olive oil is absorbing
all of the tannin that otherwise would be interacting with your mouth. So in short,
the fat globules in an emulsion are able to sort of soak up a bunch of the tannin, which reduces
the perception of bitterness and astringency. Now, there are some unexplained things here. Namely,
does it have to be an emulsion or does this same effect happen with just pure
fat? Remember the tasters put pure oil in their mouths, not an oil and water emulsion. Also,
it would be great to see the taste panel results reproduced with cheese and not just olive oil.
But since I already have this nice lardy wine already mixed together, I mean, I might as well
taste it. This is not the end of the video, by the way, this is like two thirds of the way through.
There's still another paper I have to tell you about. There's something called the
FPH. I will taste this at the end. I promise you.
Now, after going through all of this, you can start to see why most of the food
pairing rules that are out there today have no chemical or physical basis. It
takes time and money and expertise to test potential underlying chemistry or physics.
A few years ago, a set of rules called the Food Pairing Hypothesis started popping up all over
the place. Now the Food Pairing Hypothesis suggests that when foods or ingredients
have aromas in common, they should pair well together. Now this hypothesis generates
some unusual pairings. Chocolate and blue cheese.
Actually, yeah. God, that really works. Bananas and parsley. That is amazing. It's like layers
of flavor, one after another. It's like an onion or an ogre. Garlic, coffee and chocolate.
No. No, that is good. Oh my God. It is so weird. Salmon and licorice.
This is fine. Pork liver and jasmine, and this is where our props budget officially ran out.
White chocolate and caviar. Look, if ACS didn't have the budget for pork liver, what makes you
think I'm going to go out and buy caviar and ask for that to be reimbursed. Matt, what'd you say?
Okay, well, let's think about this for a second. The Food Pairing Hypothesis
kind of makes intuitive sense on one level. If two seemingly unrelated foods share a few smells,
maybe that would produce a feeling of unexpected synergy and deliciousness in your brain. But the
real test of a hypothesis like this is not to come up with a few innovative pairings. It's to
systematically test pairings, ideally hundreds of them. You'd take a whole series of foods,
foods that are predicted to pair super well, foods that are predicted to pair super poorly,
and everything in between, and then actually pair them, and taste them and see how they taste. Now,
to my knowledge, there is no published peer reviewed paper that does this.
But three students from the Netherlands did do a sort of systematic study in which
they pureed a bunch of foods and then had taste testers taste each food individually,
and then a mixture of foods. If the mixture tasted better than the
average of the two foods individually, then the students counted that as a successful pairing.
The students found that there was basically no relationship between whether a pairing was
successful among tasters and the percentage of volatile compounds the two foods shared.
For example, tomato and chocolate share 43% of volatiles, the highest percentage of all the
combinations tested. And yet the pairing was not successful. On the other hand,
the pairing of cauliflower and pear was rated as successful despite having 0% volatiles in common.
Another knock on the Food Pairing Hypothesis is that it can't explain really basic pairings like
lemon and sugar. It also can't explain pairings based on texture, for example,
croutons in a salad. Now, look, I could poop on the Food Pairing Hypothesis all day,
but the point here is that there are tons of reasons why things taste good or bad together.
And some of the reasons have nothing to do with chemistry at all. Lots of pairings are culturally
learned. For example, if you live in the US, the spice mixture of cinnamon and allspice
probably makes you think of cookies or cakes. If you live in Lebanon,
cinnamon and allspice goes in tabouli. And look, maybe someone somewhere thinks lard in wine is
good. Maybe I'm about to be converted. I don't know. This is momentous people here. Here goes.
Nope. That's disgusting. Mostly I think because the lard is rancid actually.
History lovers, we need to tell you about a new series from PBS called The Bigger Picture.
Hosted by Harvard professor Vincent Brown, it's a show that examines famous photographs and unpacks
the historical context around them. Their latest episode gives the backstory about Blue Marble,
one of the most iconic images of planet Earth ever captured.
Check out the first episode at the link in the description and tell them Reactions sent you.