The chocolates of Poco Dolce (which means “not too sweet”) have been named “top ten” in America by Saveur. One of Poco Dolce’s products is a bittersweet chocolate square with double-roasted almonds.
“Why double-roasted?” I asked Kathy Wiley, who makes the chocolates, at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon. Double roasting — roast, cool, roast again — produces a better flavor, she said. “Why not just roast them longer?” I asked. Because you are more likely to over-cook them. There are special ovens for roasting nuts but she doesn’t have one.
This is basic material science. Wiley wants to maximize the concentration of certain molecules (that produce a roasted almond flavor) while minimizing the concentration of other molecules (that produce a burnt flavor). By trial and error she has figured out how. She was able to do the trial and error — i.e., research — because her business is successful. Her business is successful in large part because of connoisseurship and gift rituals. People give her products as gifts.
I believe we have genetic tendencies toward connoisseurship and gift-giving holidays and rituals because, long ago, these tendencies supported research in material science. Pleasure from finely-made things and desire for gifts supported artists and artisans, who by trial and error learned better control of their materials. Poco Dolce is a latter-day example.
Seth, you seem to be treading on common ground with Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style. Have you read it?
https://www.vpostrel.com/tsos/
Only a little of it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Double roasting almonds is not science!
It is quite literally the opsopoiia (”fancy cooking” such as making delicate pastries or other cookery, i.e., aimed at flattering the senses and directed by empeiria (”experience”, or a kind of knack)), rather than techne (”art” or “craft”, the root of technology, i.e., a rational enterprise aimed at some end enacted by a skilled practitioner), that was skewered (as “collateral damage”, so to speak) by Plato’s Socrates in the Gorgias dialogue.
At least as written (who knows? maybe Poco Dolce has a GC/MS in the back room), it appears that there is no underlying theory of mechanism, no Popperian falsifiable hypotheses, etc. characteristic of science. Instead, it is just a somewhat blind “fiddling around” until some arbitrary aesthetic criteria is reached. (Actually, the same thing originally bugged me about the post on the gold nanoparticles—stained glass, but I couldn’t put my finger on it precisely). While these kinds of efforts certainly increase man’s material comforts, and perhaps serve as a “raw material” for scientific discovery, the end is not to answer/raise any question. For example, one could not use these results to hypothesize the conditions for roasting hazelnuts instead of almonds, other than “try the same thing, and maybe it will still work (or be close)”. At best this is the kind of low level “engineering” practised before the development of classical mechanics, where you build bridges, cathedrals, aquaducts similar to known examples that didn’t fall down (and hope that yours doesn’t fall down either).
That’s true, it’s engineering at best, not science. In the phrase “material science” there is a bit of the usage of “science” that occurs in the phrase “computer science” — which is not science at all, either. Professors in Computer Science departments don’t wonder how computers work; it’s just that “computer science” sounds better than “computer engineering”.