The Taste Makers
Givaudan’s chemists don’t cook; they collect headspace
From Saveur, January-February 2002
One scorching afternoon last spring, Xiagen Yang and Andy Lam, two American chemists from Ohio, were on a farm near Go Cong, in southern Vietnam, picking acerola, a fragrant, red New World fruit now cherished in much of Southeast Asia. Harvesting acerola is never easy—the plant has unforgivably prickly leaves—but it was especially hard work for Yang and Lam, whose every move was being scrutinized by a group of villagers who squatted nearby, staring at the chemists as though they’d just fallen from the sky
“Man, these people are tripping,” said Lam, a native of Vietnam, who had not been in the country since shortly after the fall of Saigon. (Yang was born in China.) “But this fruit is worth it—fresh and sweet. Do you know how many years it’s been since I last tasted it?”
Gathering rare fruits in hot places is all in a day’s work for Yang and Lam. They were in Vietnam on a trip sponsored by their employer, Givaudan Flavors Corporation, a $1.5 billion per year Switzerland-based company with offices and labs in 40 countries. Along with devising fragrances that end up enhancing products such as lotions, room sprays, and perfumes, Givaudan creates flavors for many of the world’s best-known food manufacturers—flavors that make, for example, chicken bouillon cubes taste more like chicken and bottled roasted-garlic salad dressing taste more like roasted garlic.
The chemists’ mission: to sample some of Vietnam’s favorite ingredients and dishes—including acerola, purple mint, and bun bo hue, a pungent beef noodle soup prized in the central part of Vietnam—and to extract, in vapor form, the aromatic essences of each. After returning to America, they would analyze the chemical structures of the essences and replicate them in the laboratory, producing flavors that would mirror those of the original foods—a travel snapshot you could taste. Soon, fruit lovers all over the world might be able to experience the sugary succulence of Go Cong’s acerola in a globally-marketed acerola-flavored syrup.
Later, on a veranda belonging to one of the villagers, I watched as Yang and Lam began capturing the taste of the fruit, a process known as “collecting headspace.” The term has nothing to do with clearing one’s mind. Instead, it refers to gathering, usually with the aid of a funnel or a tube, the aroma molecules that exist in the space immediately surrounding a particular dish or ingredient, or inside the ingredient itself. As Lam mashed up a beaker full of acerola—an action that simulates chewing (which itself releases aromas into our own private olfactory systems)—Yang attached a sleek vacuum-pump device that would suck up the fruits aromatic compounds and contain them. The two worked rapidly to trap the aromas before they could dissipate or be corrupted by heat or humidity, among countless other potential environmental interferences. Although the collecting of headspace is urgent initially, the whole process can take quite a long time—up to six hours, in fact.
“Raw ingredients, such as fruits and herbs, tend to take longer, while hot cooked foods part with their essences more quickly,” Yang explained. “Think of the way a steaming bowl of soup smells as opposed to a cold one and you’ll see what I mean.”
Twenty-five minutes into the extraction process, Lam had a thought that caused the color to drain from his face. “The tissue that we used to clean the fruit—it wasn’t scented, was it?” he said frantically to Yang. Keeping his cool, Yang quickly located the suspect tissue pack and confirmed that its contents were unscented. A moment passed; then Lam, sponging his brow with a handkerchief, said, “Imagine—that could’ve contaminated the whole headspace.”
The first time I encountered the peculiar world of Givaudan’s flavor researchers—in a sunny Manila cooking-school classroom tangled with plastic tubes, a few days prior to my arrival in Vietnam—I thought I’d stumbled into The Matrix, not a kitchen. I’d been invited by Givaudan to follow some of its best chemists as they traveled through the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand to gather aromas. The trip, dubbed TasteTrek Asia by the company’s public relations department, was to be a modern version of a 16th-century spice-seeking voyage—but instead of returning with a cargo of nutmeg or black pepper, Givaudan’s scientists would be toting back test tubes filled with the flavors of foods like lemongrass and tom yum soup.
“What happens inside a kitchen is almost the same thing as what happens inside a lab,” said Max Hotz, a senior flavorist (as Givaudan calls its flavor creators), looking like Avedon in a lab coat as he photographed a plate of fried shrimp. “Every chemist is a cook, and every cook is a chemist. It all has to do with manipulating molecules.” As someone who considers eating corn in April an act of treason, I was unsettled by all of this—and by the sight of Hotz and his associate Willi Grab, the director of flavor science at Givaudan’s Singapore office, attending to pots with the kind of grim, tight-lipped focus usually reserved for a crime scene. (“Max, please pass the solvent” was just one of the bothersome things I heard that particular day.)
As the hours passed, though, I saw that what Hotz and grab were doing had less in common with creating the harsh artificial flavors that went into our TV dinners in the 1960s—when grape flavor was something called methyl anthranilate, a staple flavor of my childhood—than I’d thought. Grab asked me to consider the taste of a strawberry. Although a fresh-picked berry, warm and tangy and wet with dew, might have great sensual allure, the molecular construction of the berry’s aromatic essence is no different whether it comes from the fruit itself or a test tube—given that the scientist has created an exact molecular replica. In a blind taste test (one that also ignores the textural properties of the food), the flavor of that food is just as appealing as its lab-created counterpart because the molecules are the same.
But for the average person who simply loves food—those of us who find, say, earthly perfection in the way an in-season peach sweetly explodes in our mouths—a question persists: Why not just stick with the real thing? For Grab, the answer could be found in the pot of adobo, a homey Philippine pork stew, before us. “Take this dish,” he said. “The convenience-food industry can’t mass produce it. It would take too long, and it would be too expensive. So we will use this sample and make adobo seasoning from it. It will be the next-best thing.” I must’ve looked as if I’d swallowed something bad because he added, “Remember, flavor is just a physiological perception—nothing more, nothing less.”
“It’s not only adobo-flavored products we will use this in,” he went on. “Maybe—just maybe—we will identify a new molecule from this sample, a molecule that is not yet known, not yet identified in a natural product.” Grab himself recently made such a breakthrough: he discovered a previously unknown molecule contained in the headspace of a citrus fruit native to Indonesia—a substance he described as having a slightly roasted flavor. “It will be an interesting new molecule for the industry,” he said. “We can use it in all sorts of ways.” The many ways in which such molecules can be used are surprising, if not vaguely alarming: that molecule from Indonesia might, for instance, end up as a secret ingredient in the next scrumptious new Swiss chocolate bar.
“You can modify the perceptions of the consumer by teasing them with a flavor,” grab said. Grab, and many of the chemists I met on TasteTrek Asia, seemed to savor the fact that Givaudan’s flavorists function the way that mom did when we were in love with her beef stroganoff and only her beef stroganoff. Companies like Givaudan tell our palates how particular food should taste—what, for instance, the flavor of ketchup is and should always be—in the same way that our first encounters with food shaped us. Givaudan makes food taste comforting—and even nourishing. But can we trust the cook?
A few days after leaving Manila, inside a swanky Ho Chi Minh City hotel room, Yang brought out a lab-replicated version of Chinese hot pot. A good Chinese hot pot is not easy to come by: Yang had to travel all the way to his birthplace, in China’s Sichuan Province, to collect superior hot pot headspace. Nor is it easy to make. It is famously complex, its many parts—including oysters, pork, bok choy, and Sichuan peppercorns—gradually merging into a resonant whole as diners plunge their favorite ingredients, fondue style, into a simmering stock, consuming them before slurping down the enriched broth.
I placed on my tongue a drop of Yang’s hot pot flavor, a substance he had toiled over for months. It tasted amazing. But what was so amazing about its taste wasn’t only its deliciousness; it was also its elegant distillation. One drop told the story of that evening’s hot pot, from the meal’s beginning to its sated, communal end. It was like a two-hour movie viewed in two seconds. Yang smiled like a proud father. He had achieved a phenomenal feat: he had built a better hot pot—though admittedly with none of the nutritional or cultural value of the original. Later that night, as I pondered this while trying to fall asleep, my headspace wouldn’t collect.
Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.
