Day 7: Taste

Yesterday we had a workshop led by Barb Stuckey, the author of Taste What You're Missing. She is a professional taster who worked with us to help us understand how we taste our food.

Our tasting plate

First thing in the morning we each took a litmus paper and put it on our tongue. I thought I would never have to do that again after college. I do taste the bitterness rather strongly and was classified as being on the verge of a super taster.

There are five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami. The little cups each have a colorless, odorless solution that isolates each of the tastes.

The first thing that we tasted was the sweet solution (sugar water). We talked about the reason that humans are hardwired to like sweet things. I brought up the fact that things that are sweet are usually high in calories, which of course was more useful when human were still fighting for survival. Barb said I was "exactly correct," bio 145 for the win!

The second cup we tasted was the sour solution (citric acid). One of the reasons that sour is one of the five tastes we have is to help us determine if food is spoiled or underripe. I brought up how things that are "sour" are just more acidic, which means they have a lower pH. If you eat something with a low pH it will make you really sick, so if you put something extremely sour in your mouth your initial instinct would be to spit it out. That way you wouldn't get sick from swallowing it.

The next cup we tried was the bitter solution. There are no words to describe how horrible it was. The only way I can think to describe the taste is that it was similar to uncoated Aspirin. The solution was caffeine powder dissolved in water. The reason bitter is a taste humans can detect is because it is the marker of poison, which makes sense because caffeine and aspirin in high doses will both kill you. Barb wanted to stress the different between bitterness and astringency. Bitter is a taste, whereas astringent is a texture.

The second to last taste we experienced was salt. The solution was literally just saltwater. Salt is the second taste that humans are extremely attracted to. Salt is water-soluble, which means that humans can't store it. We constantly lose salt through out the day through sweat and other bodily secretions, so we need to replenish. Of course the average American takes in about three times the daily recommended value of salt. Barb told us that some major companies that she works with are trying to help lower that statistic. Campbell's soup is reducing the amount of sodium in their soups by about 5% every year, without advertising anything about it. The hope is the re-callibrate the American palate, so foods can still taste good even though they have less salt.

The final solution we tried was umami. The solution was MSG (monosodium glutamate). It is hard to get a completely isolated umami flavor, so we had to take a sip of the salt solution before we took a sip of the umami solution to calibrate our palates to the salt. Umami is the taste that is least well known and most misunderstood. Umami is thought of as "savory." Examples of foods that are high in umami are seaweed, tomatoes, broth, and mushrooms. Beef and cheese both develop umami as they age. We tasted a young cheddar and an aged parmesan. Apparently, parmesan is the food with the largest amount of umami.

We then talked about the difference between orthonasal olfaction ("nose smelling") and retronasal olfaction ("mouth smelling"). The straw on our plate was used for an exercise where we tried to identify something by smelling it through retronasal olfaction. The ingredient was in a cup that was completely sealed except for a sliding part where the straw could fit. We put one end of the straw in the hole and the other in our mouths and breathed in through the straw. People said that it smelled like chocolate, tahini, etc. I thought it was peanut butter. It was roasted sesame paste. When we smelled it using orthonasal olfaction the sesame smell was much more identifiable.

Barb talked about how most people confuse tastes and smells. To demonstrate this, she used the jelly bean. We all plugged our noses and put the jellybean in our mouths and began to chew it. We all commented that it tasted sweet, but couldn't tell what it flavor it was. Once we unplugged our noses the flavor of marshmallow came through extremely strongly. The jellybean tasted sweet and smells like marshmallow. We did the same exercise with the spoonful of butter. Butter has no taste (unless it's salted), it just has a fatty texture. The "taste" that we associate with butter is just the aroma that it gives off.

Towards the end of the day we broke up into teams to make a barbecue sauce that had a good balance of all five tastes. My team went for an Asian fusion sauce. Every team made a delicious sauce. It was extremely interesting to see how different each sauce was when we were all given the same ingredients to chose from.

The every last thing we did was a chocolate tasting! Overall, not a bad day at culinary school...