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.