ABSTRACT
The history of physics has demonstrated repeated ventures into other disciplines turning them into physics, e.g., astronomy, geology, chemistry, and biology, and this is possibly about to happen with gastronomy, turning some gastronomy into gastrophysics. This chapter demonstrates how this works by using squid as an example. Gastrophysics is an interdisciplinary field of science that can be defined as qualitative reflections and quantitative studies of all gastronomic aspects pertaining to food, including culinary precisions and transformations, preparation techniques, texture, and organoleptic properties, with a focus on physical effects and physico-chemical characterization. Cephalopods such as squid contain about four times as much collagen as finfish, and the collagen is much more cross-bound and hence much stronger in cephalopods. Texture analysis profiles may be compared with results from microscopy, as the applied force of the probe depends on the structure and state of the collagen network inside the meat.
