Read Online Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barb Stuckey
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the taste? When does it start? When does it end? When is it the most intense? You may describe the timing of the tastes of homegrown cherry tomatoes as bitter and green at the beginning, as you bite through the outer skin. This would be called the initial or up-front taste. Then, as you keep chewing, you may experience sourness next. That would be the middle of the taste experience. And last, as you continue to chew and swallow, you may experience the sweetness. This would be the taste in the finish . The timing of taste is wonderfully illustrated by how differently we perceive the sweetness of sugar versus that of artificial sweeteners. Even though artificial sweeteners taste sweet, each one—sucralose, aspartame, saccharin, stevia, and so on—is detected in your mouth either faster or slower than sugar, and each lasts for a different length of time after the sweetness of sugar would have cleared from your mouth.
To really understand the way sweetness works for you, do the Sweetness Profile tasting exercise in the chapter on Sweet. I’ll explore this in more detail there.
The Four Qs of Taste: What, How, Where, and When
What?
How?
Where?
When?
Type
Intensity
Location
Timing
Basic Tastes
Magnitude of the taste sensation
Perception of where in the mouth/throat the sensation occurs
When the taste is sensed
Examples:
Examples:
Example:
Example:
Sweet, sour, bitter, salt, umami
Mildy sweet or extremely sour
Sourness perceived more strongly on the side of the tongue
Sourness at the beginning, with a lingering bitter taste in the finish
Adapted from: Paul Breslin, Human Taste: Peripheral Anatomy, Taste Transduction, and Coding
Tasting food with your mouth is called gustation. This word comes from Latin and shares its origin with the word gusto . I love the simple redundancy of the term eating with gusto , which can also be translated as “gustation with gusto”—a good phrase to help you remember the scientific term for taste. Smelling aromas is referred to as olfaction.
Gustation + Olfaction + Texture = Flavor
We’ll get into more later about each of these building-block tastes, as well as flavors, but for now, let’s talk about how your mouth works.
Born-Again Buds
In 1999, when I was fairly new to my job at Mattson, I had a client in the vegetable business. The owners hired us to come up with exciting new vegetable appetizer ideas for their restaurant customers. After a few days of thinking about the assignment, I knew at least one of the ideas I wanted to create: cornmeal-crusted fried green tomatoes like the ones my father had cooked for us every summer weekend of my childhood. Typically, you make fried green tomatoes with unripe, green fruit that are harder and less juicy than ripe red ones. But because they’re usually sliced before they’re fried, the tomato slices are wet and flimsy and would be too difficult for our client to handle in the quantity needed for restaurants. As I worked through the idea in my head, it morphed and emerged as cherry tomatoes—much easier to handle. When wecouldn’t find green cherry tomatoes, I decided to start experimenting with red, ripe ones just to see how they might work out. We call this the proof of concept phase.
Marianne Paloncy, one of our best chefs, called me into the food lab to show me samples of the inaugural batch of my creation. This is my favorite part of my job: seeing and tasting the physical manifestation of an idea. The little cherry tomatoes dipped in batter and lightly coated in cornmeal were adorably cute and promised crunch and flavor. They’d make a perfect restaurant appetizer.
Paloncy dropped a handful of them into the fryer basket and we waited two minutes for the cornmeal to crisp up on the outside, while the little spheres bobbed around in the bubbling oil. When she pulled them out of the fryer, they were glowingly golden brown. I couldn’t resist. As I reached my hand into the fryer basket, Paloncy started to speak, but before I could
To really understand the way sweetness works for you, do the Sweetness Profile tasting exercise in the chapter on Sweet. I’ll explore this in more detail there.
The Four Qs of Taste: What, How, Where, and When
What?
How?
Where?
When?
Type
Intensity
Location
Timing
Basic Tastes
Magnitude of the taste sensation
Perception of where in the mouth/throat the sensation occurs
When the taste is sensed
Examples:
Examples:
Example:
Example:
Sweet, sour, bitter, salt, umami
Mildy sweet or extremely sour
Sourness perceived more strongly on the side of the tongue
Sourness at the beginning, with a lingering bitter taste in the finish
Adapted from: Paul Breslin, Human Taste: Peripheral Anatomy, Taste Transduction, and Coding
Tasting food with your mouth is called gustation. This word comes from Latin and shares its origin with the word gusto . I love the simple redundancy of the term eating with gusto , which can also be translated as “gustation with gusto”—a good phrase to help you remember the scientific term for taste. Smelling aromas is referred to as olfaction.
Gustation + Olfaction + Texture = Flavor
We’ll get into more later about each of these building-block tastes, as well as flavors, but for now, let’s talk about how your mouth works.
Born-Again Buds
In 1999, when I was fairly new to my job at Mattson, I had a client in the vegetable business. The owners hired us to come up with exciting new vegetable appetizer ideas for their restaurant customers. After a few days of thinking about the assignment, I knew at least one of the ideas I wanted to create: cornmeal-crusted fried green tomatoes like the ones my father had cooked for us every summer weekend of my childhood. Typically, you make fried green tomatoes with unripe, green fruit that are harder and less juicy than ripe red ones. But because they’re usually sliced before they’re fried, the tomato slices are wet and flimsy and would be too difficult for our client to handle in the quantity needed for restaurants. As I worked through the idea in my head, it morphed and emerged as cherry tomatoes—much easier to handle. When wecouldn’t find green cherry tomatoes, I decided to start experimenting with red, ripe ones just to see how they might work out. We call this the proof of concept phase.
Marianne Paloncy, one of our best chefs, called me into the food lab to show me samples of the inaugural batch of my creation. This is my favorite part of my job: seeing and tasting the physical manifestation of an idea. The little cherry tomatoes dipped in batter and lightly coated in cornmeal were adorably cute and promised crunch and flavor. They’d make a perfect restaurant appetizer.
Paloncy dropped a handful of them into the fryer basket and we waited two minutes for the cornmeal to crisp up on the outside, while the little spheres bobbed around in the bubbling oil. When she pulled them out of the fryer, they were glowingly golden brown. I couldn’t resist. As I reached my hand into the fryer basket, Paloncy started to speak, but before I could
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