Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (20 page)

Capsaicin is the active ingredient in chile peppers that stimulates the touch nerve. On the one hand, it can be extremely painful, as anyone who has eaten too much sriracha or Cholula hot sauce can attest. In high concentrations it can inflame the soft tissue in the mouth and give a sensation that the mouth is burning. Barry Green, a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and an expert on tactile and thermal psychophysics, has done a lot of research on capsaicin. When he really pushes his tasters to explain how capsaicin feels, they agree that the sensation is more of a painful ache than a hot temperature. Yet when something burns, we usually associate it with being hot, so we use the same heat-related terminology to describe the tactile burn of chiles. They burn—or savor—hot.

On the other hand, capsaicin in high concentration can be used to treat pain. Various creams on the market, such as Capzasin-P Cream, which claims to provide “temporary relief of muscle and joint pain associated with arthritis, simple backaches, sprains, strains, and bruises,” tap into the irritating power of capsaicin. I asked Green how a substance that produced pain could cause relief.

“After repeated exposure, or very high concentration exposure to capsaicin, the mouth or the area that was treated would become less sensitive to it. It was
looked at as a potential analgesic [pain reliever] because it was thought it could desensitize pain fibers and therefore render that area less sensitive to painful stimulation of other kinds,” he said. “But it’s never been proven that capsaicin will penetrate into muscle or into joints to actually desensitize the pain fibers in the muscles or in the joints. We know it can do it in the skin, but it’s not clear it can get all the way into the inflamed muscle tissue and actually produce relief.” So don’t go smearing sriracha over your muscles after a hard workout just yet.

Information about the temperature in the mouth is also carried by the trigeminal nerve. And an inappropriate temperature—a lukewarm cup of coffee or a cold bowl of chicken noodle soup—can completely throw you off. For example, I recently dined at Mercat a la Planxa in Chicago, a South Michigan Avenue restaurant that serves up Catalan-style Spanish food in a throbbing, energetic space. I ordered a lentil and garbanzo bean salad that sounded delicious, but when it arrived, steam was wafting off the bowl. My bean “salad” was served piping hot in a creamy tomato sauce. Now, don’t get me wrong. It was unbelievably delicious. The beans were al dente, and the sauce had a rich tomato umami that was balanced by just the right amount of dairy. But a salad to me means that the dish is going to be served cold. It simply didn’t match my expectations, and much of our experience of texture is based on expectation. The best way to set texture expectation is to explain it. If I’d seen the menu item at Mercat a la Planxa listed as “Hot Lentil and Garbanzo Salad” I would not have been surprised at the table. Likewise if supermarkets marketed their produce as “Mealy Macintosh Apples” or “Rock-Hard Honeydew Melons,” you wouldn’t be disappointed if you bought one and it matched that description.

It’s impossible to fully understand food texture without understanding how fat works. This is only a glimpse, and in the chapter on new contenders for Basic Taste status, I will delve deeper into fat taste, texture, and aroma.

Fat coats the tongue unlike any other substance, which makes the flavors of fatty food stay on your tongue longer as it carries flavor around your mouth. For example, the flavor of strawberries in a fatty ice cream is carried much longer than the flavor of strawberries in a sorbet, which doesn’t contain fat. We love foods with fat in part because they savor longer, and this means we can get more flavor out of every bite.

Fat also has a unique melting profile. The way it slowly changes from solid
to liquid in your mouth is a type of texture contrast that we’re built to love. Fat has nine calories per gram—more than twice as much as the other types of calorie-contributing macronutrients: carbohydrates (four calories per gram) and protein (four calories per gram). Because we are essentially wired to seek out good sources of energy—which is what calories are—we gravitate toward fat. Because fat is so dense with calories it is also demonized by advocates of low-fat diets. An easy way to lower calories in food is to remove fat from it, but that also removes flavor from a food, because fat carries flavor.

Fat is primarily known for transforming food texture. When it’s used in baking, it shortens the dough, which means that the proteins in the dough don’t develop into long fibers that make it chewy, but instead results in short fibers, which make it crumbly. Think biscuits, scones, and pie crust. Food cooked in hot fat gets its shatteringly crisp texture from the high level of heat transfer from the oil into the food. The transfer of heat happens much more slowly when you bake a food. Fat also moves into the air or moisture pockets during frying, which doesn’t happen during baking. In fact, some of the fat in or on a food can escape from it during baking or other methods of cooking. Fat makes liquids like coffee creamer more opaque; and because fat can prevent microorganisms from taking up residence, oils and shortenings don’t need to be refrigerated.

Many attempts have been made to duplicate fat’s unique properties, as I know firsthand because Mattson was on the front line of the fat wars in the nineties. Even our most talented food technologists can do only so much, however. There’s just no substitute for the real thing.

Texture is one of the most underappreciated aspects of food enjoyment. It involves our senses of touch, sight, and hearing. I asked Cameron Fredman, the nontasting, nonsmelling attorney, if he would prefer to add taste or smell if he were miraculously granted one more sense to add to his repertoire of only three. He hesitated a long while before responding.

“I don’t know that it would necessarily be an easy choice to get either back at all. What if the world smells bad? What if I didn’t like eating anymore if I was given smell?

“I like my life,” said a man whose primary experience of food is texture. “I don’t feel disabled.”

YOU WILL NEED

4 jars of single-item baby food such as (just) apples, (just) pears, (just) peaches, (just) bananas, (just) green beans, (just) peas, (just) carrots, (just) chicken, etc.

Food coloring

Spoons for everyone tasting

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing the palate

DIRECTIONS (FOR THE ORGANIZER TO DO BEFORE THE TASTING)

1. Remove the labels from the jars and put the product names on the bottom so that the tasters cannot see them.

2. Using the food coloring very sparingly, adjust the color of the purees so that they are all very similar shades of brown. The objective is to remove all color cues from the food. Go easy with the color drops, especially blue and green! It’s easiest to put a drop of color onto a spoon first, then stir it into the food.

TASTE

• Serve your tasters all 4 of the samples and see if they can determine what they are.

• Have tasters cleanse their palates with crackers and water between samples.

DISCUSS

• Did anyone get all of them right?

• How did color color the participants’ answers?

• How did removing the texture from a food affect the tasters’ perception of its flavor?

I
’m at dinner and it’s pitch-black. Not just dark. Black. My hands are fumbling around my plate. I find something that’s clearly an asparagus spear. I lift it to my nose. Yes, definitely asparagus. I continue to move my hands over the plate looking for answers, as if it were a Ouija board. I find something that feels suspiciously like a sponge. Spongy? What kind of food feels spongy? My mind searches for an answer. Morels! Mushrooms. Yes, they are like delicious, hungry sponges, eager to soak up butter sauces. Yes, these squishy things must be mushrooms. But they also might be chicken. It’s frighteningly hard to tell. Roger is seated next to me and he
hates
mushrooms, so my fingers walk across the smooth banquet tablecloth to his plate, because I am pretty sure I can find the morels and move them, unobtrusively, over to my plate. If he were to eat one, his HyperTaster reaction to them will not be good. In the pitch-blackness I’m afraid of where he might spit them out.

Then his hand brushes mine. Foiled!

“Why are your hands on my plate?” he asks.

“Um, I think there are mushrooms,” I say.

“Really? What do they feel like?”

We are at Dining in the Dark, the name for the annual Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) fund-raising event. Proceeds from our tickets would benefit the FFB’s efforts to fund research on curing retinal diseases that cause blindness.

Dining in the Dark started in full light. We left our car with the hotel valet as if we were attending any other event. We filed into the banquet lobby and were checked in, given a table number, and handed wineglasses. When we sat down at our table in the main dining room, we exchanged pleasantries with our fellow diners.

Our salads were waiting for us and our sighted server offered us oregano vinaigrette, ladled it onto our butter lettuce with cucumber, and disappeared into the depths of the hotel. We ate our salads in the full sensory spectrum. Then Katie, our server for the rest of the evening, came to our table to replace our sighted salad server. She leaned against the back of Roger’s chair and introduced herself. She had been blind since birth. Then the lights slowly went out.

The objective of the foundation’s Dining in the Dark event is to put those in the audience into the same sensory situation that their beneficiaries encounter every day. The room went from dark to darker to black so slowly that we barely noticed the change, until we realized we had completely lost our sight. Because the organizers had taped around the doors to thoroughly blacken the room, my chest tightened as I realized that I couldn’t leave even if I had wanted to. I was stuck in the dark, suddenly forced to rely on only four of the five senses I use every day.

How does our experience with food differ when we lose one of our senses? This is a really difficult question to answer, because trying to shut off a sense is difficult. There’s always the option—and instinct—to remove the blindfold, earplugs, or nose clip. I’ve learned the hard way that going out in public with your nose or ears plugged will not result in a typical experience. People want to know why you’re doing this strange thing. This is what makes Dining in the Dark such a great event. We were all in it together. And there were no blindfolds to remove.

My best friend, Teri, was sitting on the other side of me while the lights were out. She leaned over and whispered to me, “I can’t eat anything else.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m completely grossed out,” says Teri, who admits to having an extra sensitive appetite. She would never eat a sandwich from which someone else had already taken a bite. A hair on her plate will send her out of the room, unable to eat for the next hour without retching.