If you find strange combinations on your plate in a restaurant, Bernard Lahousse is probably to blame. At WDCD14 the Belgian food scientist will tell how he designs with tastes.
Coffee, strawberries and asparagus make an excellent combination. Vanilla is a major flavour component in all three, which is why they go together so well. Top-chefs around the world experiment with such unexpected food combinations based on a method invented by Belgian bio-engineer and food scientist Bernard Lahousse.
Lahousse is seen as one of the world’s foremost food innovators. As a bio-engineer he is specialized in food and sustainability. Out of his passion for gastronomy he started to offer his scientific knowledge to chefs in de surroundings of his home town of Courtai.
While top-chefs like Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià invented new combinations of tastes empirically, Lahousse set out to develop a scientific approach to food innovation. The method he came up with, called Foodpairing, is based on the principle that foods combine well with one another when they share major flavour components.
In 2007 Lahousse launched the interactive website Foodpairing.com, which offers easy-to-follow graphs, known as ‘Foodpairing trees’, with branches of foods that share common basic flavour profiles on a molecular level. Today the model inspires top-chefs including Blumenthal and Adrià experiment with new combinations.
Lahousse, in the meantime, is working on new methodologies to support chefs in their creativity through the food research-company he started together with two partners. Apart from supporting chefs their aim is to create tools for the food industry to develop more efficient food products.