Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (3 page)

“It’s five little bites. Each reflects one of the five tastes in the mouth, in a form that’s enjoyable,” he says. “These are the tastes you’re going to experience throughout the evening.”

The last time I dined at Cyrus, we started our Five Tastes Tower with savory: a warm demitasse of
kombu dashi
—a delicate broth made from seaweed—at once meaty, mushroom-y, and marine. From there, we moved on to sour: a
Peony grape on the half shell with pickled napa cabbage. We followed it up with a sweet bite that combined candied kumquat and goji berry puree. The next taste was a bitter beer “bubble,” just solid enough to hold its gelatinous shape on the spoon, yet fragile enough that it burst into a shot of beer the moment it hit the warmth of your tongue. The final, salty taste was another playful twist on the familiar. What looked like a plain, salted pretzel exploded with truffled cheese upon the first bite.

Not including the Five Tastes Tower of canapés, petits fours, three types of bread, two different kinds of butter, and beverages, a fixed price meal at Cyrus consists of five to eight courses. It’s likely that you’ll experience hundreds of flavors in a single meal. So what does Keane mean when he references the “five tastes” you’ll experience in your meal?

Keane is referring to the only five tastes we
Homo sapiens
can detect using our tongue alone:
sweet, sour, bitter, salt,
and
umami
, the savory taste of some proteins that gives broth, meat, and aged cheeses their distinctive fullness. These tongue sensations are known as the five Basic Tastes.
¹
If it’s not one of these five tastes, it’s technically not a taste at all. Anything other than sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami is experienced through another sense: smell, touch, sight, or sound.

After my tortilla chip moment, I wanted to know the science behind
all
the food aromas that tempt my appetite, the tastes that hit my tongue, and the texture combinations that please my mouth more than others. I turned to a famous resource:
The Physiology of Taste
by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the classic tome written in 1826, often cited as the first attempt to demystify taste. I bought two different translations, but even the American English translation by M.F.K. Fisher couldn’t simplify the abstract concepts enough to make them sound contemporary and fresh.

To explain how taste and smell work physiologically, Brillat-Savarin did the best he could with the science of the time, but almost two centuries have passed since he gave the world his “gastronomic meditation.” The fact that he called
it a
meditation
conveys pretty clearly that it’s heavy on conjecture and light on science. I don’t mean to blame Monsieur Brillat-Savarin—he simply had little science to reference and not much else to go on but his own experiences.

Fortunately, when I started digging into modern sensory science, I found a treasure trove of published research and institutions like the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to research on taste and smell. Called the chemical senses, taste and smell work when a chemical—in other words, a food—activates them. All food is made up of chemicals. Everything, from a freshly foraged mushroom still smelling of the earth it came from to a neon-bright Cheeze Doodle that stains your fingers orange, can be broken down into its chemical constituents.

Other brilliant people all over the world, from neuroscientists and molecular biologists to dentists and psychologists, are exploring these chemical senses. I signed up to receive their professional journals and downloaded scientific papers
in order to ingest the few salient points that I could understand. But as someone who had avidly avoided science classes in school, I longed to read a straightforward book written for a layperson that could teach me how to taste food without first having to teach myself science. There wasn’t one, so I decided to write this book.

Even before my tortilla chip epiphany, food had been the focus of my career, as well as an obsession that influenced where I vacationed, which books I read, whom I socialized with, and what I studied in school. Yet because I knew so little about taste, like most people, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

By the time I realized I wanted a career in the food business, I had been talked out of culinary school. In retrospect, that was for the best. I enjoy the eating of professional cooking much more than the routine of it. Then there’s the fact that, with my quick, ungraceful movements, I routinely cut off the very tips of my fingers. Though I lack knife skills, I still love to cook at home, which I do almost every night I’m in town (and not dining out). Sometimes I’m even successful. For me, cooking is about experimenting with food. For Roger, my fiancé, it’s an exercise in patience and holding his tongue.

At Cornell University’s Hotel School, I focused my graduate studies on food and beverage management and wine, and wrote restaurant menus for the hotels that hired us for consulting projects. Some of my culinary exposure had me cooking with Chef André Soltner, owner of the famous restaurant Lutèce in New York City. In the kind, grandfatherly Alsatian chef’s class, I learned classic French techniques. With his gentle manner, he taught us how to make perfect spaetzle, using a cutting board and knife to flick them into the boiling water, how to peel a calf’s brain (a skill I haven’t used since), and how to cut carrots into perfect eighth-inch brunoise cubes.

But in none of these classes was I ever taught how to
taste
a carrot.

For the four years prior to graduate school I worked for Kraft in the company’s food service division, which meant I was selling coffee, sauces, and other food to restaurants, and meeting chefs in their kitchens to have them taste my samples. Yet Kraft never taught me about the sensory aspects of the food I was representing. When I graduated from hotel school, I moved to San Francisco and began moonlighting as an official restaurant inspector for the
Mobil Travel
Guide
in the Bay Area, eating in four-and five-star restaurants four or five nights a week. I was trained to conduct a thorough restaurant review: from judging the quality of the cocktail service at the bar to knowing whether the wineglasses were leaded crystal to checking whether the valet returned the car seat to the same spot in which the owner had left it.

Of course we were responsible for evaluating the food, but the reviewer program didn’t include training on how to discern tastes or aromas or testing of my senses of taste and smell. For all my editors knew, I could have been lacking one of my senses. I wrote my reports blind to many of the sensory details of a meal.

Just as eyesight varies from perfect vision to nearsighted, farsighted, and grades of blindness, taste perception varies almost as widely, but we don’t acknowledge the differences in the same way. There is no taste test given to children in elementary school, but all of the kids are expected to eat the same foods. Worse yet, kids are expected to eat (and enjoy) the same foods as adults. I’m not suggesting that we start to test kids’ taste perception or let them eat whatever they want, but I am suggesting that we start teaching adults about the spectrum of different taste worlds that we all live in.

At Cyrus, my meal included a truffled red wine risotto. It was distinct from other risottos, which can be heavy with butter or Parmesan. Cyrus’s risotto was alive, almost crisp, because Keane had added an assertive red-wine sourness, one of the five Basic Tastes that’s usually absent from risotto.

“Sometimes I get a complaint that it was too salty, and it’s not. It was the acid in the risotto. It happens more than you’d think,” he says, referring to diners’ perception of sourness as too much salt in a dish. While we all experience food differently, many people simply have fundamental misperceptions of the Basic Tastes. Keane has noticed this repeatedly over his eighteen years of professional cooking. There is an anatomical reason for this confusion between sourness and saltiness, which we’ll get to later in the book.

Chef Keane cranks out more than 600 meticulous courses of five-star food every week. He knows his guests don’t want a lecture on taste physiology while sipping Champagne and nibbling caviar and it’s not his role to teach diners the difference between sourness and saltiness. If someone sends a tart risotto back
claiming it was too salty—even if he tastes it and finds that the salt is not out of whack—he will still show grace and humility (as chefs must) and replace the dish with something his diner likes better.

Taste What You’re Missing
will help you better understand what you’re tasting by breaking food down to its component parts, such as the five Basic Tastes, and explaining how
flavor
differs from
taste
. Just as wine enthusiasts hone their palates with education, curious eaters—like you—can improve your tasting ability. When you understand what you taste, you will be able to better articulate not only what you like and don’t like, but
why
. You’ll learn how to make food taste better by understanding how flavors interact with one another and, as a result, which tastes and flavors are lacking or out of balance. This is an important skill to master if you enjoy playing restaurant critic when you eat out. And it’s even more helpful if you are doing the cooking.