Imperial College FoodCycle is organising a charity dinner cooked by Tom Aikens. It will be held on the 21 March 2011 at Whole Foods Market, High Street Kensington. FoodCycle is an organisation that uses raw food ingredients donated by various supermarkets and other suppliers, that would otherwise be wasted, to cook meals for people who cannot afford a hot meal. An excellent example to follow!
As a part of the MSci project on Cooking a Steak, we would like to communicate the physics and those physical processes that take place during cooking to the general public. Karim Bahsoon and Jason Chang are the two fourth year undergraduate students working on this project.
The dessert course of the menu will be a chocolate mousse by Tom Aikens. Tom is a Visiting Researcher at the Physics Department and he has been advising us on the menu. In addition to his help Tom actually cooked all the courses for us so that we know how the original versions taste.
Yesterday we submitted our first paper on food research to Journal of Food Engineering entitled “Tenderising effect of sodium bicarbonate on pork loin”. The paper is based on the work Xiao Liu Chu has done on comparing the effect of sodium bicarbonate with sodium chloride solution (brine). The authors are XL Chu, P. Török, C. Paterson, Tom Aikens. Here is the abstract of the paper:
“We investigated the effect of a 3% concentration solution of sodium bicarbonate (treatment A) and pure sodium bicarbonate (treatment B) on pork loin samples. These were compared to a 5% salt brine (treatment C), controls consisting of tap water (treatment D), and untreated samples (treatment E).