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.
  ▶ Watch

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.
  ▶ Watch
• 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.
  ▶ Watch
• 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.
  ▶ Watch

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.