Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (2 page)

Stuckey, Barb.

Taste what you’re missing : the passionate eater’s guide to why food tastes good / by Barb Stuckey.
        p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Gastronomy. 2. Taste buds. 3. Food presentation. I. Title.

TX631.S836 2012

641.01’3—dc23

2011038535

ISBN 978-1-4391-9073-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-5472-1 (ebook)

For Roger, whom I love more than tomatoes

Contents

Introduction

What Are You Missing?

Tip of Your Tongue, Tip of the Iceberg

Part One: The Workings of the Senses

1. Taste

2. Smell

3. Touch

4. Sight

5. Sound

6. How the Pros Taste

7. From Womb to Tomb

Part Two: The Basic Tastes

8. Salt

9. Bitter

10. Sweet

11. Sour

12. Umami

13. Fat: The Sixth Basic Taste—and Other Candidates

Part Three: The Nuances of Flavor

14. Taste Magic: The Business and Chemistry of Flavor

15. Terrible Tastes Taste Terrible

16. Perspective

17. The Chef Who Lost His Smell, and Other Tragedies of Taste

18. How Taste Affects Your Waist

Part Four: Putting It All Together

19. Balancing Flavor: Recipes That Teach

20. Summary: Sensory Truths You Never Suspected

21. Fifteen Ways to Get More from Every Bite

Notes

Illustration and Photography Credits

Resources and References

Smell and Taste Treatment Centers and

Research Centers Without Clinics

Acknowledgments

Index

A
humble tortilla chip changed my life.

Most people who are obsessed with food have a different kind of epiphany. Their eye-opening, revelatory moments take place in storybook locations: a first taste of cheese made from unpasteurized milk in Aix-en-Provence. Or a fish, just plucked from the water and given a quick steam in banana leaves on a beach in Vietnam. Or a forkful of deconstructed gazpacho in Spain that made them understand—no,
really
understand the local fascination with chilled tomato soup.

There’s always a moment, but mine was much less romantic and, instead of opening up a world of flavor, it taught me just how little I knew about how to taste food.

My moment happened in a laboratory in Foster City, California, at the northern tip of Silicon Valley. In 20,000 square feet of stainless-steel lab bench tops with overhead fluorescent lighting, surrounded by homogenizers, colloid mills, dough sheeters, impingement ovens, pH meters, and tube-in-tube heat exchangers, I encountered a tortilla chip that would change my life.

I had just arrived at Mattson, the food development company where I still work as a professional food inventor. Our founder, Pete Mattson, had asked me to help with a project for a snack food company. Like many other companies, this client had enlisted our services to help it develop a new product. Our team had been tweaking the client’s formula for a tortilla chip that would be sold in
grocery stores. To me, there didn’t seem to be much room for creativity: tortilla chips are little more than cornmeal, salt, and some kind of fat. I mean, come on. How hard coult it be?

One morning as I arrived at the office one of our food technologists called me into the food lab. “Barb,” she asked, “can you come taste tortilla chips?” It was 8:30 a.m.

It would take a couple of years before I’d get used to bizarre requests like this at inopportune times—a unique benefit of my job as a food developer. Could I taste frozen garlic puree at 10:00 a.m.? Could I taste meat lovers’ pizza right after lunch? And would I mind a quick spot of oatmeal before heading out to happy hour?

Yet the discussion that day was revelatory. My new colleagues debated the tortilla chip prototype, and as I listened, it seemed as if they were speaking a different language—one that I knew existed, but didn’t understand. John wanted to add a touch of sugar to promote caramelization in the moisture-removal step. Teresa thought it needed a savory edge; she suggested adding autolyzed yeast extract. Pete, a self-professed saltaholic, wanted to add salt, applied topically with a bit of citric acid for zip, both ingredients ground into the finest particulate size we could achieve.
Particulate?

The discussion turned to whether the chips should have a fresh corn flavor or a more masa harina–like flavor. The choice would determine whether or not we’d soak the kernels in calcium oxide, a processing aid that gives the corn a distinctly tortilla-like flavor that’s different from the sweet flavor of corn on the cob. There was talk of using a coarser grind of milled cornmeal to affect the mouthfeel. I’d never heard the word
mouthfeel.
Other terms like
up-front
and
finish
were used in ways that were unfamiliar to me and I learned new ones like
rheology, mouth-melt, lubricity
, and
tannin.

All this from three different chips fried at three different temperatures. I tasted them, but couldn’t tell much of a difference between them, and so I just listened as my more experienced colleagues dissected each chip, verbalizing the nuances as if each was as distinct from each other as a slice of bread, an apple, and a chicken wing.

I wondered what I was missing. Clearly, we’d all been sampling the same chips. Why were they able to identify so many more tastes, flavors, textures, and aromas than I was? Were they just better tasters than I was? Did they have better genes? Or was it training? Practice? Experience?

This was my moment, my revelation: the tortilla chip showed me that I had no clue what was happening when I tasted food.

Later, after five or six years of working with our chefs and food technologists, I began to trust my palate and became less terrified of voicing my opinions as I tasted prototypes alongside them. I had learned the science of taste by being thrown into the frying pan of food development, shaken around for a few months, then tossed into the fire for a few more years of seasoning. Along the way, I picked up the language, a sort of Food Speak.

I even surprised myself with a newfound skill: I could take one bite of a food, consider it for a millisecond, and know exactly what it was missing that would give it an optimal taste. For instance, I would know in less than a second if a sauce was missing acidity. More important, I knew what ingredient would give it the right type of needed sourness within the pH range we were targeting without overwhelming the other tastes and aromas.

Years later, at a client meeting, I was giving a presentation to a group of marketers at a Fortune 500 food company, trying to convince them that a combination of tomato solids and enzyme-modified cheese would deliver high levels of a taste we refer to as umami, making the product I was advocating irresistibly delicious. I stopped, looked at my audience, and saw a roomful of blank stares.

Umami, a taste we describe as savory, brothy, or meaty, is one of the five fundamental building blocks of flavor. Yet this group of food marketers had never even heard the term. They knew more about the tastes and aromas in wine than they knew about the tastes and aromas in food. This makes sense, though, because wine-tasting courses are common and there are hundreds of books on the fundamentals of tasting wine. Yet I’d never heard of a food-tasting course and there seemed to be no books on the subject. Why would this be? While only 34 percent of Americans drink wine, a full 100 percent of the human population eats food.

After another decade in our food lab, my taste vision got sharper and sharper. I felt as if I could see flavors more clearly, hear food more crisply, and glean more detail from everything I put into my mouth. At that first tortilla chip tasting, I had not known that there could be so many facets to a mere snack chip, yet it turns out that every food has a level of fine detail that we normally take for granted: Chips. Bananas. Tomatoes. Everything.

I began to apply what I knew about professional tasting at work to my dining life outside work. Eating became an experience of infinite complexity. I felt that I could suck more juice out of food, wring more pleasure out of meals. I was woozy with newfound power. My food priorities changed. I began to spend much more of my income on dining out, honing my new skills.

I used to review restaurants, and though I no longer do, I still go out of my way to eat great food, because I enjoy it and because it gives me critical insight into restaurant trends for my job as a “creative” in the field of food development. I’ve eaten in dozens of venerable
Michelin Restaurant Guide
–starred restaurants around the world, and dined at some of America’s top-rated tables. Cyrus restaurant in Healdsburg, California, is among the best.

Getting to Cyrus isn’t easy. From San Francisco International Airport, you follow Highway 101 north for two hours, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the cow-pastured hills of Sonoma County. The drive requires commitment, especially on a Friday evening when commuters clog the long, narrow freeway on their way home to the idyllic serenity of California’s wine country, but a meal at Cyrus is unforgettable.

Executive chef Douglas Keane and maître d’ Nick Peyton give Cyrus its personal charm. Perhaps the best maître d’ I’ve ever met, Peyton used to work at Masa’s Restaurant in San Francisco, before cofounding Cyrus with Keane. One night, after I had taken exhilarated advantage of the bountiful wine list at Masa’s, Nick noticed my tipsiness and offered to drive me home in my own car. He parked it in the driveway, said good night to my companion and me, and jumped into a cab to return to Masa’s. Most restaurant operators would have simply stuffed us into a taxi. It was a gesture I’ll always remember. When I walked into Cyrus two years later, Nick asked if I was still driving that blue Volkswagen Beetle.

Nick makes you feel wanted and—most important—
anticipated
, and then Chef Keane takes over, immediately rewarding guests at their tables with a foot-high metal Five Tastes Tower, stacked with silver plates that hold pristine, bitesize canapés. “My goal is to greet somebody with a little gift when they walk in the door,” he explains. Keane’s objective is to prime the diner’s palate in a unique way. It’s a thank-you for the journey you’ve made and a welcome to the culinary one you’re about to begin.