Taste
Posted 11-Oct-2008 at 11:33 PM by O_Chef
What does that taste of?
Taste… I ask you what is it really for? When you listen to a wine sommelier talking about the blackberries in the Burgundy they are drinking, are they really there?
Why can we sometimes eat a huge plate of food and feel content, yet sometimes a relatively small plate makes us feel we don’t want to continue? Why are some combinations of flavours so right… and some so wrong?
This is all about our sensory perception to taste. Taste is a sense, and all of our senses are given to us for one reason. That is protection.
We have made a luxury of these senses through our evolvement in time, with great music we listen to… artwork our eyes admire… soft, comforting fabrics against our skin that we wear… perfumes we spray… and fantastic food we eat.
We have 5 basic taste sensations, these are found by the tongue and they are categorised as SWEET, SOUR, BITTER, SALT, UNAMI.
All the rest of our taste comes from our olfactory bulb in our nose. If you have a cold you notice a distinct lack of taste, the same for airline food. This is because the olfactory bulb swells preventing the volatile food molecules being read and understood. That said, the smallest and warmest food molecules always get received 1st, and upon chewing more molecules are released and carried up to the nose… this is how flavours develop.
We all know of classic combinations such as chocolate and orange, strawberries and cream, chicken and mushrooms… but why have these become so well known?
How is it that some chefs can combine ingredients such as caviar and white chocolate, coffee and fennel, oysters and passion fruit? And these really work, against our minds better judgement…
Flavours are extremely complicated, and unfortunately our ability to detect them isn’t. There are more than a billion flavour molecules, all individual. Our senses can only detect 230 odd of them. It is when our brain maps an ingredient its limitations then become confused. If we were to plot a graph with the flavour molecules of an orange, and then do the same with basil, a part of the two graphs would overlap. This can sometimes confuse our brain so it is totally wrong, but more importantly informs us of any combination where orange is good, its highly likely that basil would be too. So instead of creating the orange flavoured chocolates, why not try with basil and see how complimentary it is!
This is where the wine tasters remark the ‘oak’ or ‘leather’ notes for instance. Neither are actually there… but a taste sensation they pick up on is similar.
The next thing I’d like to talk about is pallet fatigue.
Like I said earlier… our senses are for protection. Think about getting into a hot bath. It’s uncomfortable and you have to ease yourself in, but once you have got accustomed to it then its fine, and it hasn’t burnt you at all. This is your touch sense reacting to danger, and once it has recognised the danger isn’t of high profile you relax and no longer feel uncomfortable.
Eating is the same. Many children don’t like Brussels sprouts, yet as an adult can eat them easily. This is a reaction to danger… as cabbage shares part of the flavour chain as poisonous nuts, and the texture of a hard Brussels sprouts creates the reaction of dislike. To spit it out for survival. Once the brain is educated then this reaction can be turned down.
Pallet fatigue is of utmost importance. Just like the hot bath, once a sense is provoked for a sustained time the body turns down the reaction to it. This can be disastrous to a dish. If the dish is flat on texture and doesn’t hit a varied number of tongue tastes then it quickly becomes boring as the senses close down to it, regarding it as safe.
By using vinegar and sugar as well as salt and pepper as seasonings can give more dimensions to a dish, and keep them alive.
An extreme example of this is chewing gum. You probably agree with me that the flavour lasts a maximum of 10 minutes. In actual fact the flavour lasts days, but our senses stop tasting it as it is registered as safe. That same piece of chewing gum if you removed it and had a glass of water, and 2 minutes later chewed it again, you would find it went back to its former glory and full of minty taste!
With this in mind I hope the next blog I write about dish concepts and menu creating will fall into place nicely!
Taste… I ask you what is it really for? When you listen to a wine sommelier talking about the blackberries in the Burgundy they are drinking, are they really there?
Why can we sometimes eat a huge plate of food and feel content, yet sometimes a relatively small plate makes us feel we don’t want to continue? Why are some combinations of flavours so right… and some so wrong?
This is all about our sensory perception to taste. Taste is a sense, and all of our senses are given to us for one reason. That is protection.
We have made a luxury of these senses through our evolvement in time, with great music we listen to… artwork our eyes admire… soft, comforting fabrics against our skin that we wear… perfumes we spray… and fantastic food we eat.
We have 5 basic taste sensations, these are found by the tongue and they are categorised as SWEET, SOUR, BITTER, SALT, UNAMI.
All the rest of our taste comes from our olfactory bulb in our nose. If you have a cold you notice a distinct lack of taste, the same for airline food. This is because the olfactory bulb swells preventing the volatile food molecules being read and understood. That said, the smallest and warmest food molecules always get received 1st, and upon chewing more molecules are released and carried up to the nose… this is how flavours develop.
We all know of classic combinations such as chocolate and orange, strawberries and cream, chicken and mushrooms… but why have these become so well known?
How is it that some chefs can combine ingredients such as caviar and white chocolate, coffee and fennel, oysters and passion fruit? And these really work, against our minds better judgement…
Flavours are extremely complicated, and unfortunately our ability to detect them isn’t. There are more than a billion flavour molecules, all individual. Our senses can only detect 230 odd of them. It is when our brain maps an ingredient its limitations then become confused. If we were to plot a graph with the flavour molecules of an orange, and then do the same with basil, a part of the two graphs would overlap. This can sometimes confuse our brain so it is totally wrong, but more importantly informs us of any combination where orange is good, its highly likely that basil would be too. So instead of creating the orange flavoured chocolates, why not try with basil and see how complimentary it is!
This is where the wine tasters remark the ‘oak’ or ‘leather’ notes for instance. Neither are actually there… but a taste sensation they pick up on is similar.
The next thing I’d like to talk about is pallet fatigue.
Like I said earlier… our senses are for protection. Think about getting into a hot bath. It’s uncomfortable and you have to ease yourself in, but once you have got accustomed to it then its fine, and it hasn’t burnt you at all. This is your touch sense reacting to danger, and once it has recognised the danger isn’t of high profile you relax and no longer feel uncomfortable.
Eating is the same. Many children don’t like Brussels sprouts, yet as an adult can eat them easily. This is a reaction to danger… as cabbage shares part of the flavour chain as poisonous nuts, and the texture of a hard Brussels sprouts creates the reaction of dislike. To spit it out for survival. Once the brain is educated then this reaction can be turned down.
Pallet fatigue is of utmost importance. Just like the hot bath, once a sense is provoked for a sustained time the body turns down the reaction to it. This can be disastrous to a dish. If the dish is flat on texture and doesn’t hit a varied number of tongue tastes then it quickly becomes boring as the senses close down to it, regarding it as safe.
By using vinegar and sugar as well as salt and pepper as seasonings can give more dimensions to a dish, and keep them alive.
An extreme example of this is chewing gum. You probably agree with me that the flavour lasts a maximum of 10 minutes. In actual fact the flavour lasts days, but our senses stop tasting it as it is registered as safe. That same piece of chewing gum if you removed it and had a glass of water, and 2 minutes later chewed it again, you would find it went back to its former glory and full of minty taste!
With this in mind I hope the next blog I write about dish concepts and menu creating will fall into place nicely!
Total Comments 3
Comments
 |  wow.. what a write up.. nice work especially love Quote:
the same for airline food
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| |  If you had airline food on the ground I doubt you could eat it. Far too salty and rich. But at high altitude our nose swells and we can't taste much. I worked with a guy called Gerard Coleman, who owns the chocolate shop L'Artisan Du Chocolat in Sloane Square, London. He's probably the best chocolatier in the UK (supplies all Gordon's restaurants and the Fat Duck too - yea - they buy chocolates in as opposed to making them tut tut!) and we developed a vanilla chocolate for the business class flights for BA. It was a hard task making something too flavoursome to eat! |
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| | wow, bet that fact is not available anywhere else on the internet lol.. definitely did not know that.. very interesting, thanks |
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- Taste (11-Oct-2008)
