Plate spinning: the smart chef's secret ingredient

Food that’s pointing in a particular direction is more appealing – which is why restaurants can charge you extra for itIn what must be food’s biggest contribution to science since Newton’s apple, a plate of pickled onions has given us new insight. Small, halved teardrop-shaped onions, to be precise, arranged on a puddle of tapioca, sugar cane vinegar, peanut and fermented cream. Charles Michel, a chef with a keen interest in food psychology, came across this dish by the Michelin-starred São Paulo-based chef Alberto Landgraf and considered how the pointy bits of the onions were intuitively positioned away from the diner. This, he thought, was interesting – according to other research, downward-pointing triangles are perceived as threatening. And nobody wants a scary pickled onion.The research that followed, conducted by Michel and his colleagues from the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University’s department of experimental psychology, appears to have found the best way to plate food. They conducted an experiment online, and another with more than 1,600 participants at the Science Museum in London, asking people to rank their preference of the dish pointing up, down, right or left; then they were asked the rotate the plate to their favoured orientation. Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Food & drink Food science Restaurants Life and style Chefs Psychology Source Type: news