From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject To Make Jellyfish More Appetizing, Add Light and Sound Effects to the Dining Experience
Date September 10, 2019 12:00 AM
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[Jellyfish is the latest dish cooked up by gastrophysicists, who
combine food science and physics to change the appearance, feel, and
taste of what we eat. ] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

TO MAKE JELLYFISH MORE APPETIZING, ADD LIGHT AND SOUND EFFECTS TO THE
DINING EXPERIENCE  
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David Adam
July 11, 2019
Hakai Magazine, Smithsonian.com
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_ Jellyfish is the latest dish cooked up by gastrophysicists, who
combine food science and physics to change the appearance, feel, and
taste of what we eat. _

In Asia, many jellyfish species find their way into cuisine. The
largely tasteless animals are used predominantly for their texture.,
David Fleetham/The Image Bank/Getty Images Plus

 

It is a dining event like no other. Your ears fill with the sounds of
crunching snow and crumpling paper while ripples of light cascade
across your plate. And then, you pop into your mouth something once
described as having the texture of both a cucumber and a condom: a
jellyfish. Welcome to sustainable seafood for the climate change era.

Ryujin’s servant, a jellyfish-based dish—or, really, an
_experience_—is on the menu at the London, England experimental
restaurant of Kitchen Theory run by chef Jozef Youssef. As diners eat
the jellyfish—tentacles removed, cured, seasoned, cut into strips,
and served alongside fermented cucumber—they wear headphones to get
the most from the soundscape while images of swimming fish are
projected onto the table.



It’s the latest dish cooked up by gastrophysicists, who combine food
science and physics to change the appearance, feel, and taste of what
we eat. Ryujin’s servant is an attempt to harness a light and sound
show to persuade people in Western countries to eat a traditionally
Asian food. Details of the dish, including the recipe and the
accompanying ambiance, are revealed in a recent scientific paper
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“We often forget that eating is something that requires us to use
all of our senses,” says Steve Keller, the sonic strategy director
for Pandora, a streaming music platform based in California, who
helped design the experience. “This is a way to hack our perception
of flavor to make jellyfish more pleasing to a Western palate.”

The intricate effort to make jellyfish appetizing to new audiences
arrives as people around the world grow increasingly annoyed by
jellyfish blooms, in which vast swarms of jellyfish seem to appear out
of nowhere. On the west coast of the United Kingdom, jellyfish the
size of sewer covers are appearing as oxygen levels and predator
populations fall and pollution and temperatures increase. In response,
governments have released jellyfish-eating fish and turtles into their
waters, sent out spotter boats to locate the swarms, and set up
dedicated phone lines to report them. Jellyfish, the paper notes,
could be “one of the few foods that we could remove from the sea
that would have a net positive effect.”

But getting people to eat jellyfish isn’t easy. Charles Spence, a
psychologist at Oxford University in England who helped study
diners’ reactions to the experimental dish, says people’s
perceptions of new foods are heavily influenced by the first time they
try them. So, if people in the West are to take to jellyfish, it’s
important to make their first exposure as positive as possible. “We
can try to make jellyfish a feel-good food,” he says. The reaction
to the dish, its creators report, has been uniformly positive.

Spence has tried jellyfish several times. “It has no taste at all.
It’s just the crunch that gets you,” he says. “Nothing else is
wet and crunchy at the same time.”

Crunchiness is one of the food’s most appealing attributes, but
it’s not the jellyfish’s natural state. This crunch comes from the
way Asian cooks have prepared jellyfish for centuries—by soaking it
for a month in a salt solution, a process similar to the tanning of
leather. Scientists in the West have turned to gastrophysics to find a
way that takes a lot less time.


A team led by Mie Pedersen at the University of Southern Denmark in
Odense has discovered that dropping jellyfish into 95 percent alcohol
can turn them into crunchy crisps. Pedersen just published a technical
analysis of the process [[link removed]],
which she calls the point where “soft matter physics meets the
culinary arts.”

Thomas Vilgis, a gastrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for
Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, who worked with Pedersen, says
that by using their process, jellyfish can even be given new flavors,
such as strawberry, by adding them to the alcohol.

Taste and texture aside, Vilgis says there are other factors that may
make people consider adding jellyfish to the menu. For example, the
ethical qualms some people have about cooking live lobster by dunking
them into boiling water don’t apply to jellyfish, Vilgis says,
because they have no brain or heart and cannot feel pain.

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