Explore the food

When we eat, it is often the mouthfeel of the food, we notice. Especially when the food does not feel as expected: when the meat is tough, the sauce grainy or the bread pasty.

Ambassador of taste Mathias Porsmose Clausen, Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, has been granted 9.9 millionDanish kroner from Villum Fonden to continue his work examining food and cooking through microscopy.

With the newest techniques, Mathias is able to discover the ‘inside’ of the food and visualise how water, fat, proteins, and carbohydrates are placed in relation to each other. This gives an exact insight into the structure of the food, which is pivotal for the mouthfeel. Jonas Drotner Mouritsen’s and Mathias P. Clausen’s beautiful photo above is an example of what a tsukemono-pickled cucumber looks like in a close-up to the left and in a microscope to the right.

Mathias hopes to develop new and better cooking methods for different kinds of food and potentially make plants or animals, which we do not traditionally eat in our part of the world – for instance jellyfish or squids – into tasty food.

The article Explore the food shows examples of Mathias P. Clausen’s work (in Danish). 

If you are interested in knowing how different textures of food can be described and categorised, then try our “Texture cards” (in Danish). They can be used as a teaching resource or for your own interest.