HOW TO REPLACE BASIL?

Maybe you are surprised we selected basil. Basil was found to have the highest energy-label possible (´E´) all year round (based on the calender of the Milieu centrale, an independant Dutch organisation aiming at improving the attitude versus sustainability). It is remarkable that although basil is often produced in Belgium or The Netherlands, according to this calendar, it still gets this high label.This is probably due to the growing conditions (in heated glasshouses) and the costly transportation due to the vulnerability and the relatively big volume of the fresh plant. 
So the distance is not always a good measurement to determine if a product is high or low in carbon foodprint. 
We know this website won't save the world, but we do hope we can change the way you look at ingredients, flavors, local ingredients and help you in being creative and sustainable with it.

Our recipe:

3 g Whole Coriander seed
0.5 g Dried Laurel
0.2 g Dried Thyme
0.1 g Dried Tarragon
1 seed Cardamom
1 head of a Clove  
a pinch of Cinnamon powder
a pinch of Ginger powder      
50 ml Olive Oil        

Preparation:

1. Weight the amounts of all the ingredients. 

2. Put all the herbs in a blender or mixer and blend until the herbs are cut into small particles.

3. Put the mix in a mortar and put 5ml of the oil in it as well. Crush it until a nice herb paste arise.

4. Put the paste in the plastic bag, add the other 45 ml oil and vacuum it.

5. Store the bag 1 night in the refrigerator, around 4°C. When no vacuum-machine is available, you have to store the herb-mix in oil longer than 1 night. 

6. The next day you have to sieve the oil with a SuperBag sieve.

The oil is now ready to use, enjoy!

THE MEAL OF THE FUTURE: REPLACING CHICKEN...

Continuing the work of orange, we made a meal of the future containing some of the trends we believe in. We build the dish around a vegetable, as we believe recipes shouls start in the future from vegetables, fruits,... not anymore from meat or fish.

We chose a carrot. To find out which combinations we can make with carrot, we used our FOODPAIRING WEBSITE. From the Foodpairing tree of carrot, we selected: chicken, orange and basil.

But as chicken and orange have a carbon footprint which is high, let's replace those two ingredients by combinations of other products.

1. Replace the Chicken

As we have a large insight on aromas linked to products, we know for example which molecules are relevant in chicken. Based on that insight, we started to look for other non-meat ingredients to reconstruct the chicken flavor.

This is what we found and has the same flavour as chicken:

Spongecake ‘chicken’

80 g pine nuts

80 g sugar

4 eggs

20 g flour

20 g oil of pine nuts

- heating the pine nuts without coloration

- mixing in Thermomix with sugar

- mixing the eggs

- adding the flour

- adding pine nut oil

- set aside for at least 6 hours

-  Sieving, pouring in siphon, adding 2 gas cartridges

-  Heating in microwave: 55 seconds on 900 Watt

2. Replace the orange

As explained in the previous post, you can replace orange by this combination or another combination based on the sunburst diagram

Orange “ Carbon Foodprint “:

5 g gooseberry

20 g physalis

3 seeds of coriander

1 juniper berry

10 g melon

- mixing and sieving

3. Superfast, without compromising the flavour

Onions superfast

Cleaning the onions

Adding in vacuum bag, adding some vegetable stock

1 minute heating on 900 Watt in microwave

This way of preparing onions, give you flavour and speed.

All together, you get this recipe: Carrot – ‘Chicken’ – ‘Orange’ - Basil. 

We can also create gels without adding sugar or additives. Using the intelligence of Mother Nature, but we will return to that topic in another post.

Voilà, the meal of the Future...

ORANGE

Graph on how to replace orange.

We used following ingredients: physalis, melon, gooseberry, coriander and juniper berry

Our recipe:
20 g of Physalis
10 g of melon
5 g of gooseberry
3 seeds of coriander
1 juniper berry

Preparation: 

Put everything in a blender

And blend

HOW TO USE CARBONFOODPRINT?

If we for example take orange, we need at least a mix 10 key components to obtain the flavor of orange. To visualize this, we made a graph where every colour stands for a key component.
This is the graph for orange.

So you see 10 different colours. Each colour is a key odorant. The type of key odorant is also described like herbaceous woody (green colour).
To obtain the orange flavor, you have to take from each colour 1 product.
To give an indication of how much you should take, we added lines. The longer the line, the more you have to add of that product. This is really an indication as flavor may vary a lot from product to product.

If you see the same product popping up in several colours, you don't have to count them together. Just look at the highest quantity as a starting point.
We, ourselves have to do a lot of experiments before we obtain the right profile.
The nice thing about mixing them all together is that you will be surprised to obtain a lot of other aromas. Before we found orange we also got mango, strawberry,... So it is really a fun thing to do.
Use the descriptions associated with each colour. If your experiment misses some green, citrus, look at the graph where you will find cilantro, lovage root,...
A lot of fun and if you find a good combination, please send us your recipes so we can share it all over the world

CARBONFOODPRINT WILL BE LAUNCHED SOON AT ECC!

We will release this website during our workshop at ECC, the 23th of September. For more information on the workshop; ECC monthly workshops.