Regular contributor (and frequent critic) Jim Chevallier has a new bread book out, this time on the subject of the baguette. It’s packed full of Jim’s usual insight and erudition, and is available for a song (I’d actually say a ditty) here.
READ ONReader Erika poses a very interesting question:
READ ONSo as we get older and find we need to add more hot sauce, more seasonings, etc, is it because we have killed off our taste buds or desensitized them? And if it is desensitizing- is that the same phenomenon as the “sophisticated” palate mentioned earlier?
There is such a thing as the opposite of a supertaster. It’s a person with up to 50% fewer taste buds on their tongues than the rest of us average folks. These people are called, rather uncreatively, “non-tasters.” I guess it goes to show that for every superpower there’s a foil. Bizarro World had its evil anti-version of Superman. In our own world we’ve got “non-tasters” which are, admittedly, a whole lot less interesting.
READ ONNo, it’s Supertaster! A man — or woman — with up to 100% more taste buds on his or her tongue than a typical mortal!
There is such a thing. In fact there are lots of them…living among us, existing in a flavor universe that’s up to twice as intense as our own. It’s thought that up to 35% of women and 15% of men are so-called “supertasters”, their super power being their ability to perceive flavors — especially those in the bitter family — at a much higher level of intensity than the rest of us.
READ ONYep, you can buy it now. What’s inside these shiny, hip-looking tubes? A cynic might say it’s plain ol’ tomato paste with a little puréed anchovy, porcini mushroom and parmesan mixed in, all sold for many times the price. Of course that’s not me. Find out more about packaged umami here, but ignore the snarky comment about Americans and how we’d only appreciate it if it tasted like pizza or potato chips. Indeed! I wouldn’t touch the stuff unless it tasted like either Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes or deep fried JELL-O in a cup. So there!
READ ONDid you know that there is no single “taste center” in it? Considering all the various pieces of sensory hardware that are used for tasting, it’s really no surprise. MRI’s administered to test subjects made to slurp different-tasting syrups through tubes have shown that flavor sensations are processed in at least four different parts of the brain, parts that are distributed in both hemispheres. This is almost certainly why people who sustain various kinds of brain injuries often report different effects – many of them strange and contradictory – on their taste buds. It’s probably also why, since tastes are perceived by the brain as a kind of global “impression” versus a specific sort of data, tastes can be so hard to put into words.
READ ONWe’ve done taste buds, tongues and chewing, so at last we can get around to perhaps the most important part of tasting: smelling. For it’s in the nasal cavities where the majority of the sense we think of as “tasting” occurs.
As anyone who’s ever had a cold can tell you, things don’t have much flavor when you can’t smell. The reason is because plugged sinuses prevent the essential oils liberated by chewing from reaching our olfactory receptors.
READ ONReader Stacey asks if it’s really true that it’s the sense of taste that cues the brain to tell us if we’ve had enough to eat. Staci, I was more confident of my answer before I found out that there was a full-on satiation researcher following this conversation (see the comments on the below post). So expect to see a lot more qualifiers and far fewer declarative sentences moving ahead. But yes, that’s at least partly true.
As I understand it, it’s our umami sensors that bear much of that burden. Umami is stimulated primarily by glutamic acid, a so-called proteinogenic amino acid, which is to say, an amino acid that’s used as a building block of protein molecules.
READ ONReader Susan writes:
Taste and flavor; two words that are often used interchangeably. Discuss.
Are you kidding? I can hardly wait! Technically speaking, the word “flavor” is more narrowly defined than “taste.” Sensory researchers define flavor as the set of sensations that occur on the tongue. Taste, on the other hand, is what happens on the tongue, in the sinuses, the ears…the whole shootin’ match. And it’s all related to chewing.
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