6Taste, flavor and seasoning

A cook has to know how to give food flavor. That means knowing the ingredients that add it, such as herbs, spices, salt, oils, vinegars, condiments and wines, and knowing how and when to use each one.

It also means knowing how people sense food. The tongue, the nose, the nerves of the mouth, the eyes and even the ears all play a part. A cook who understands them can taste a dish, describe it clearly and fix it.

6.1 Taste, aroma and how flavor works

Flavor is more than taste

People often use the words "taste" and "flavor" as if they meant the same thing. In the kitchen they do not.

• Taste is only what the taste buds on your tongue pick up when food touches them.
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• Aroma is smell. Odors reach the smell receptors in your nose in two ways: in through the nostrils, or up from the back of the mouth while you eat.
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• Other sensations come from nerves in the tongue and the soft lining of the mouth. These nerves report pain, heat and cold. The brain reads some of these signals as spicy, pungent or astringent (drying).
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• Flavor is all of these together: the tastes, the aromas and the other sensations a food causes in your mouth.
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• Mouthfeel is a related term. It means the whole feeling of a food in the mouth, made up of its taste, smell, texture and temperature.

How the idea of taste grew

Different cultures have sorted tastes in different ways for a very long time.

• China. As early as 1000 BCE, Chinese thinkers named five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, pungent (hot or spicy) and bitter. Each was linked to an organ of the body, a season, an element of nature or a star sign. Keeping the tastes in balance in a dish or a meal was thought to support health and good luck.
• India. Ayurvedic medicine, which grew up at about the same time, counts six tastes. It adds astringent to the Chinese list. Indian cooks try to balance all six in a dish, partly for health.
• Greece. Some centuries later, the philosopher Aristotle named seven tastes. He placed them in a line, with sweet at one end and bitter at the other, and the remaining tastes in between.

Science later replaced these systems of balance. Today a taste is defined as a sensation picked up when a substance touches the taste buds of the tongue.

The five basic tastes

Sweet. Most people enjoy sweetness more than any other taste. It comes from sugars that are already in a food, such as sucrose and fructose, or from sweeteners a cook adds. A small amount of sour, bitter or salt can make a sweet food seem sweeter. Too much of any of them makes it seem less sweet. Oddly, the less sweet food you eat, the better you become at noticing sweetness.

Sour. Sourness comes from acid in food, and it can be mild or very strong. It is treated as the opposite of sweet. Many sour foods, such as red currants and sour cream, also carry a little sweetness. A touch of sugar can improve a sour dish; a lot of sugar can cancel the sourness altogether.

Salty. Apart from a few foods such as oysters, other shellfish and seaweed, food tastes salty because a cook chose to add salt (the mineral sodium chloride) or a salted ingredient, such as soy sauce or salt-cured fish. Salt finishes a dish and lifts its other flavors. Food without enough of it tastes flat. As with sweetness, people who eat less salt notice it more.

Bitter. Bitterness comes from alkaloids and similar natural substances. People sometimes enjoy it, as in coffee and chocolate. A bitter ingredient with nothing sour or salty to balance it is usually disliked, though. Bitterness is thought to be an old survival warning that a food may be harmful or not fit to eat.

Umami. Japanese cooking has long counted a fifth, savory taste, and many Western researchers now accept it. Its name comes from the Japanese word umai, "delicious". No single English word fits it. People describe it as savory, as a rich, full taste, or as meatiness. Taste buds sense umami when glutamate is present. Glutamate is an amino acid found naturally in food; monosodium glutamate (MSG) is the version made in factories.

Foods high in glutamate, and so high in umami, include:

• cheese, meat and rich stocks
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• soy sauce, shellfish and fatty fish
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• mushrooms, tomatoes and wine
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• foods that have been aged or fermented
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The tastes are not counted the same way everywhere:

• Western tradition names four: salty, sweet, sour and bitter.
• Asian cultures add three more: umami, spiciness and astringency.

Food with several of these in balance is usually the food people think tastes good.

Hot, spicy and astringent are not tastes

What changes how flavor comes across

The biggest factor in how a dish tastes is how much flavoring goes in, how good it is and how concentrated it is. A chef learns the right amounts through practice. Several other things also change what a diner notices.

• Temperature. Warm food tastes strongest, because heat sets free the flavor compounds that rise into the nose. That is why good cheese is served at room temperature. Sweet and sour tastes both fade as food gets very hot or very cold. Salt behaves differently: in very cold food the same amount tastes saltier. So adjust the seasoning at the temperature the food will be eaten: hot food while it is hot, cold food while it is cold.
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• Consistency. A thicker food takes longer to reach its full flavor, and the flavor is weaker. Two bowls of the same sweetened heavy cream show this: whipped, the cream has more volume and tastes milder than the same cream left liquid.
• Contrasting tastes. Sweet and sour work against each other, so a little of one can improve a food led by the other. A pinch of sugar softens a sharp vinaigrette; a squeeze of lemon tempers the sweetness of broiled lobster. Add too much and the main taste disappears. Sweet, sour or salt will also cut the bitterness of a mostly bitter dish.
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• Fat. Many flavor and aroma compounds dissolve in fat. They escape slowly as you eat, so the flavor lasts. With too little fat the flavor is short-lived. With too much, fat coats the tongue and blocks the taste receptors.
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• Color. Diners judge flavor with their eyes before they take a bite. A food in an unexpected color is harder to name, and when the color matches what people expect, the flavor seems stronger. A lemon dessert should show some yellow; if it is green, diners expect lime and may be let down. A blood orange's dark red flesh suggests a different flavor, although it tastes much like other sweet oranges. A slice of apple that has gone brown can seem off when it is not.

When the diner's senses are weaker

Taste can be dulled by age, illness, tiredness and stress. Chefs should think about who they are cooking for and adjust seasoning to suit.

• Age. Taste and smell both weaken over the years, but more slowly than sight and hearing. Smell usually goes first. People vary a lot in when this starts.
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• Health. A cold can block smell for a while, because mucus stops odors reaching the nose's receptors; taste stays mostly the same. Some medicines dull saltiness, some leave a lasting bitter taste, and some reduce saliva so that dry food is hard to swallow. A person on blood pressure medicine may also be on a low-sodium diet.
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• Smoking. Smokers are generally less sensitive to smells than non-smokers. Taste is lowered straight after smoking but is back to normal two hours later.

Describing flavor: the flavor profile

Food scientists and professional tasters describe smells and tastes for a living. To share a common vocabulary for foods such as coffee, beer, fish, chocolate and cheese, they often use flavor wheels and similar charts.

A cook can describe a dish with a flavor profile. It follows the food from the first smell to the last swallow. It helps you judge a dish and choose what to serve alongside it, whether that is something to contrast with it or something to match it. A profile can include these parts:

Take a roast free-range chicken:

• Top note: rosemary.
• Middle notes: the chicken itself.
• Low notes: anchovies and garlic.
• Aftertaste: garlic and vinegar linger.
• Roundness: the sauce.

Together these give the dish good depth. An experienced chef tastes each batch of such a dish and adjusts the flavorings, ingredients or cooking to keep its balance.

Words for flavoring ingredients

• Seasoning: something added to bring out a food's own flavor without changing its taste much. Salt is the most common.
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• Flavoring: something that adds a new taste and changes the food's own flavor, such as herbs, spices, vinegars and condiments. Many cooks use "seasoning" and "flavoring" to mean the same thing.
• Herb: the leaves, stems or flowers of one of many fragrant plants, used fresh or dried.
• Spice: the seeds, berries, buds, bark or roots of a fragrant plant, normally dried and sold whole or ground.
• Aromatic: a food added to boost the smell of another food. Most herbs and spices count, and so do some vegetables.
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• Condiment: once, any added flavoring, herbs and vinegars included. Today the word usually means ready-made flavorings: prepared mustards, relishes, bottled sauces and pickles.

6.2 Tasting like a cook: the senses

When you taste food as a cook, your job is to describe the food, not to say whether you like it. "I love it" tells nobody anything. A useful description of a chocolate pudding might say it is medium brown, smooth and shiny, and thick without being set, with sweet, chocolate and vanilla flavors.

When people eat, they usually blend everything they sense into one opinion. With practice you can pull the senses apart. Most people notice a food's qualities in this order:

• how it looks
• how it smells
• how it feels
• its flavor

Sound can tell you something too.

1. Sight: appearance

Look before you taste. Not every question fits every food, and some foods will need words of your own.

• Color: which color it is (red, brown, yellow-green and so on); whether it is light, medium or dark; bright or dull; even or blotchy.
• Pieces: whether the pieces are small, medium or large; their shape, such as square, round or flat; and whether they are spread evenly through the food.
• Surface: shiny or dull; smooth, rough, grainy, curdled or bumpy; shriveled or plump; wet or dry; soft or hard; loose or clumped.
• Clarity: clear, hazy or cloudy; see-through, half see-through or solid; with visible bubbles or particles, or without.
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2. Smell: odor and aroma

Sniff the food several times. Smells come from volatiles, substances that rise from the food as vapor, and they reach smell receptors high inside the nose. The possible words for food smells run into the thousands. Single smells are often called notes: a cookie, for example, might have notes of toasted wheat, caramel, butter and vanilla.

3. Touch: consistency and texture

Handling food, cutting it, biting and chewing it all show how it reacts to pressure. Ask whether it is:

• thin or thick; soft, firm or hard
• light and airy, or dense and heavy
• springy or rubbery; slippery or slimy; sticky
• brittle or crumbly

Your mouth also feels the size and shape of particles, and the fat and moisture a food gives up as you chew. These words describe what it finds:

4. Flavor

Flavor is the overall impression made by chemicals released from food while you eat. It has three parts.

• Tastes. Substances that dissolve in water reach taste receptors on the tongue and elsewhere in the mouth. There are only a few tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
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• Aromatics. These are notes such as lemon, butter, cinnamon, cheesy, meaty, burnt or rancid, and thousands more. They seem to come from the mouth, but chewing pushes air carrying the food's vapors up to the smell receptors. For most foods, aromatics give most of the flavor.
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• Chemical feeling factors. These are neither taste nor smell. They include astringency (a dry, puckering feeling), heat from spices, coolness from menthol, the bite of very fizzy drinks and the pungency of horseradish.
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5. Hearing: noise

Some foods make sounds as you eat them, and those sounds shape what you notice. Listen for crispness, crunch and squeak.

Recording what you sense

A simple sensory record has one line for each sense, and one more:

• appearance (sight)
• odor or aroma (smell)
• texture and consistency (touch)
• flavor (taste)
• noise (what you hear as you chew)
• anything else you notice

Fill one in for each food you taste.

6.3 Seasoning versus flavoring

Many ingredients make food taste better. They work in two different ways, and a skilled cook knows which is which.

Flavoring changes the food's original flavor. It can work in two ways.

• As a contrast. A liqueur added to a dessert sits beside the dessert's own flavor, and you can taste both.
• As a blend. Several flavorings can merge into one new flavor in which you cannot pick out the parts. The spice mix in a pumpkin pie is a good example.

Herbs and spices are the main ingredients for both seasoning and flavoring. Wines, spirits, fruit zest, extracts, essences and oils are used too. Knowing how to use them well matters more than knowing exactly which plants are herbs and which are spices.

When to add them

• Add dried seasonings early and fresh ones late.
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• Season lightly while the food cooks, then taste and add more just before serving, especially fresh seasonings. Building flavor step by step like this is sometimes called layering.
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• Baking is different. Once a cake or bread is baked, it is hard to add seasoning, so bakers test their recipes in advance to get the spice right.
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Fresh and dried herbs

Herbs are mostly the leaves of fragrant plants with soft, non-woody stems. Fresh herbs are milder than dried ones, so you need more of them: up to half as much again. Going the other way, if a recipe gives an amount of fresh herb, use about half that amount of dried.

The fresh herbs used most often are parsley, basil, thyme, rosemary, coriander, sage, oregano, tarragon and marjoram. Good fresh herbs smell clean and fresh and have no wilted or brown leaves. Sealed in an airtight plastic bag, they keep for about five days. Add them close to the end of cooking so heat does not drive off their flavor.

Dried herbs lose strength quickly unless they are kept in airtight containers; stored that way, they can last up to six months. Add them at the start of cooking, because their flavor takes longer to come out.