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22nd century coulis

By Alain Gayot

With the world’s population expanding like a hot air balloon readying for flight, our food supply needs to be addressed at a macro level by huge chemical firms such as CPKelco. Still at a macro level, this global company, itself the result of a merger of the Danish company Copenhagen Pectin and Kelp Company, is in the hands of the larger company Huber, which focuses on rheology (the flow of unusual materials) and hydrocolloids.

The products manufactured include: carrageenan, cellulose gum, diutan gum, gellan gum, locust bean gum, microparticulated whey protein concentrate, pectin, welan gum, xanthan gum, and other novel biopolymers. And you will find them in applications spanning across food, pharmaceutical, oral care, personal care, household and consumer products, paper coatings and oil field drilling industries. Every day, you are using a product that contains something they made. They have more than 3,500 customers in over 100 countries worldwide. That’s big!

Now, all this becomes a whole lot more fun at the micro level. Some of you have heard of molecular gastronomy and chefs such as Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck near London, Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Yountville, California, Adrian Vasquez and Michael Cimarusti at Providence in Los Angeles and Grant Achatz at Alinea in Chicago. They all use these inoffensive powders to wow their customers. Following the quest for fire in human food consumption, there was Nouvelle Cuisine [something we spearheaded much later], but in a way, molecular cuisine has been around, too. It’s just very hip for some and very silly for others. Luckily, we spent a few hours with a live Tintin-look-alike of a not-so-mad food scientist to help us understand all of this at CPKelco’s headquarters in San Diego.

Upon arrival at the site, we were not sure what to expect. But when we saw Ted in his white blouse greeting us at the gate of the secure facility, we immediately knew there would be lab time, especially with the thermometer and other tools hanging from his pocket. The lab is actually the office of scientist Ted A. Russin, M. Sc. Food Science.

Ted, who grew up on a farm in Canada, has always had a hand in food. At a young age, he was fascinated by Cool Whip. He wanted to know the perfect way to make Kool-Aid, and in junior high, turned in a paper on the nutritional content of a chocolate bar. Continuing on the chocolate theme, he made 200 cakes by altering the ingredients in different combinations to observe the results. Later, he worked at restaurants during his humanities studies. Long gone is the dream of becoming a philosopher and now it’s all about creating new foods, developing food products and in the process saving lives.

“My life is all about hydrocolloids now,” says Ted. “We break everything down to the molecular level and build it back into a food application. There is always an opportunity to find a new microbe that will synthesize Xanthan which occurs naturally on cabbages, it’s just that it was only observed in the 50’s, and Gellan from lily pads in the 80’s.Biology has a way to control water and all that I am doing is slowing down the H20 molecule, and giving it heat resistant capabilities, for example. Ever wonder how the oil and vinegar stay in perfect suspension in some salad dressing? You have to thank guys like Ted for that. “Our products are typically sold in 25 Kilogram bags, so we are very far away from a consumer shop, but you can buy our stuff through Le Sanctuaire online and top chefs have published recipes in their cookbooks for you to try at home.”

After the recent scare at The Fat Duck, which was closed after patrons fell ill, we were wondering if these products could be toxic. In the case of Ted’s lines, we felt reassured that they are quite safe. Despite his busy schedule, Ted finds time to create his own recipes and shows up at prestigious centers of higher learning such as the Culinary Institute of America to satisfy students’ curiosities. Instead of spending a lot of heat energy, you could whip up a perfectly consistent raspberry coulis in five minutes, or make a roux that would please your cardiovascular surgeon. Applications are endless. We asked Ted if he could find a way to keep the water stable in our bodies to keep our skin looking young. “Well, if we can stabilize bone marrow in a dish, why not?”

Upon leaving our experiments, we asked where Milou was (Tintin’s shadow of a dog in the Belgian cartoon) but rest assured, Ted is doing a whole lot better than Tintin, as he was greeted on the way out by his gorgeous nutritionist girlfriend. We are happy to report that Ted is doing very well. Can you imagine a job that you enjoy, where you get to save people, travel to pass on knowledge, work with creatively crazy chefs and eat fun stuff? He has it almost as good as we do!

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