Inbal is Eating London: Experiments In Food - The London Experimental Food Show

Experiments In Food - The London Experimental Food Show

Early last week my beloved told me: ‘You remember we got tickets to that food show on Saturday, right?’. I actually had no clue what he was talking about... turns out my beloved ordered the tickets a few weeks ago, but sort of forgot to tell me about that! No worries, luckily (for him) it was actually great fun.

The tickets that cost only £10 gained us entry to one of the most interesting shows we went to lately. It was held in the centre of the Brick Lane area, famously a mecca for lovers of vintage clothes and special jewellery shops, countless galleries, street art, and especially the beat and chic that simply spills over from the people who live here and come to visit.

The show that brought us here on this fine day was held by the Experimental Food Society (yes such an organization actually exists), and its goal was to demonstrate how can simple ingredients (food) serve for various purposes other than eating them.

Right after entering the rather simple house where the show was held, we noticed a hawk made of sugar, spreading its wings over the stunned visitors. It was amazing to see how many details can be created from sugar (too bad we couldn’t take a bite from one of its feathers – this will be a recurring theme throughout this visit since most of the exhibits were not for eating and it was a bit of a pity!) www.scottohra.co.uk

The sweet hawk was so big and impressive that it attracted our attention where-ever we went in the exhibition hall so it gets another picture:

You think we’re at a puppet show? Not at all, here the guys from Blanch & Shock Food Design are hanging cakes from fishing strings hanging from the ceiling. The instalment was about the psychological aspect of food, and refers to the common approach of linking food to weight. The two guys who worked on setting this up explained to everybody who was asking them (while all the time hanging pieces of cake and meringue from the strings) that they prepared cakes that are significantly light-weight compared to ‘normal’ cakes, by using ‘molecular gastronomy’ techniques.

If I had friends from the Gothic community or fans of magic (in the sense of practical tricks, not witchcraft like in fantasy films), I would buy them a cake from The CakeConjurer

Around the corner we ran into chocolate and candy instalments by Carl Warner. Mr. Warner specializes in creating models out of food. The models appear in photos that are simply incredible!

At this show they had a chocolate train, an Eiffel Tower built of chocolate bars and berries, and a house whose base was made of cookies and halva (sweetmeat of sesame oil and nuts) and its walls are ornamented with countless colourful candies.

The chocolate train at the show

The chocolate train in Warner’s photo

The House of Candy in Warner’s photo

The Eiffel Tower at the show

The Eiffel Tower in Warner’s photo

What a beautiful and smart piece of artwork! I came to him and told him how much I was impressed by his work, and he thanked me in typical British politeness...

I warmly recommend going to Warner’s website and enjoying the many photos of his wonderful works. The food photos will make you feel like you’re inside a fairytale, ready to take a bite off the picture.

The really experimental part was held in a different place nearby. For £6 we got a small box that contained several ingredients, as described on the flyer we got with the box:

Noodle salad with fungus and a little jellyfish ‘meat’
Pan-fried lamb’s testicles on cous cous
Worms on yoghurt with bee vomit (honey)
Sausages wrapped in pure gold & silver with clapshot
Seaweed snack – actually, it’s the same algae you can find in sushi
Space dust (those candies that pop in your mouth)
Carrot with a hole cut through its length and a straw at its tip
Marshmallow with the insect that’s responsible to the pink colour of many of our foods (Cochineal bug).
Cheddar, parmesan and lettuce sandwich.

The creators of this box of wonders wanted to expose the visitors to the show to ingredients we meet on a daily basis, and help us look at them in a different way than we’re used to. For example, the 1kg of worms need 1/10 less plant matter compared 1kg of beef – and has roughly the same amount of protein. The ‘space dust’ entered our lives as a result of an experiment in setting candy and CO2 under pressure. The purpose of the carrot with the hole in the middle and the straw stuck in it was to show us how it can become a musical instrument (with a highly annoying sound). We also learned that bee vomit is actually honey.

Where does the sandwich fit into all of this? Turns out that in order to extract the most of the taste in every sandwich (or food in general) we need to warm it up to a minimal temperature of 36.5 degrees. The simplest way to do this is by sitting on our sandwich! So we did exactly that – we sat on our sandwich together with several other people that felt quite embarrassed at the beginning. We hatched on our sandwiches, laughed and tasted the various ingredients of the box (in other words, my beloved ate the worms) and it was a lovely ‘bum sandwich’ meal.