Well, I wanted to show Adidas that bad smells could be good. So I took a sample of an old David Beckham sneaker and used the same molecules I found on this stinky shoe to create a cheese. Well, the cheese was shaped like a football and branded Adidas and served at the World Cup to the Adidas clients.
— Did you already guess that was scent artist Sissel Tolaas? Read more at The Empress of Scent: Sissel Tolaas at VISI.
This week's poll is about food and perfume. Talk about anything you like: food and perfume pairings, your favorite foody perfumes, the last great thing you cooked or ate and what perfume you were wearing at the time. Or, share a (short) recipe or link to a recipe.
Note: image is Salted Caramel Macarons [cropped] by Shauna Younge Dessert Tables at flickr; some rights reserved.
Surely the fact that peak citrus season falls smack in the middle of winter is a sign the cosmos is not entirely without mercy. Just when we’ve thrown away our holiday trappings, the supermarkets brim with flashes of color. Even the humblest corner bodega has good oranges right now. My amazing local grocery store is having its annual citrus festival, and the produce section is crammed with so many exotic varieties that I brought my camera with me on my last shopping trip.
The fruit was piled high in fragrant chaos — pale chartreuse pomelos the size of melons nestled alongside orange-red kishu tangerines no bigger than a kiss. White, pink, red and yellow grapefruits kept company with a dozen different varieties of oranges, including sour Seville oranges begging to be roasted with duck, and blood oranges with their deep maroon flesh and Cara Cara oranges that are supposed to taste of raspberries but tasted, to me, exactly like a sweet-sour Pixie Stick. Not only were there kumquats (and I ask you, is there a more adorable fruit than the kumquat?) there were limequats and mandarinquats (which I keep wanting to call manquats, though I can see why they didn’t). There were real live bergamots, round as cue balls, and wrinkled, deflated yuzus, both of them smelling — when I dragged a nail across their peels — twice as heavenly as all the teas and candies and perfumes that feature them…
One day last month, Anna Payet wore a new perfume to an outdoor party in the northern Spanish town of Roses. The fragrance was mainly citrus, with notes of bergamot, warm milk, and brown butter. Extending her wrist for a fellow partygoer to sniff, Payet gushed, "Doesn't it smell good enough to eat?"
It should. The perfume in question, Núvol di Llimona (or "Lemon Cloud") was created by her brother-in-law, Jordi Roca, pastry chef at Cellar de Can Roca, one of Spain's most acclaimed restaurants...
— Read more at The New Spanish Scent That's Good Enough to Eat at Time. And you might remember that Jordi Roca liked to sample women's fragrances at Sephora to find inspiration for his desserts.
After sniffing my way through a tea shop, a rose emporium, a spice shop and a few glasses of wine, naturally I thought it was time to smell some cheese. I know, I know — I can hear you giggling. But let’s get the jokes about sweaty socks and “cutting the cheese” out of the way right up front, because when it comes to aroma, cheese has much more to offer than stink.
“Every cheese — and there are thousands — has a different smell,” says John Antonelli, the owner (with his wife Kendall) of Antonelli’s Cheese Shop, who was kind enough to answer my questions about how scent is important to his work as a cheesemonger. “And it’s not different as in a variation within the same spectrum, it’s different as in night and day. I mean, there are cheeses that smell like roses, there are cheeses that smell like steak, there are cheeses that smell like smoke.”
In fact, when it comes to aroma, cheese is so complex that when Antonelli trains his staff to use their noses, the first thing he tells them is to go home and “start smelling everything as often as they can.” What they need, he says, is to fill their heads with a reference library of aromas from the world around them.
The same kind of cheese can smell markedly different from maker to maker or season to season…