Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (4 page)

Cooking with a recipe is fairly simple. Dice to this size, measure this much, do this action, cook for this amount of time. But cooking doesn’t necessarily teach the cook why the recipe calls for fermented fish sauce, or how you can fix the dish if it doesn’t taste right. Cooking from a recipe is really more about how to make that dish than it is about how to cook. Cooking without a recipe requires putting ingredients together using inspiration and technique, which is what they teach in culinary school. Yet it’s just as important to learn how to taste, a skill you can’t learn by following a formula.

In
Taste What You’re Missing,
you will also learn tasting techniques that will help you understand what makes food delicious. You will learn to season by
taste
, not by measuring. After you understand how flavors work together, you will learn to trust your palate, freeing yourself from the tyranny of recipes. You’ll understand how to season food without a guide. This can change how you feel about cooking: You could go from feeling like an overworked short-order cook for your family to feeling like an inspired artist who feeds your creations to the ones you love.

As a novice wine taster becomes more adept at identifying the flavors in wine, he tends to seek out more complex wines. The same holds true for food. I want you to seek out better food because eating better food means living a more satisfying—and arguably healthier—life. Later in the book I will explore how
taste influences the food choices you make. Of course, you choose certain foods because you like them, but we’ll explore
why
you like them.

Our individual food preferences change continuously from the time we are born to the time we die. Understanding this will help you better understand the food choices of your kids, partner, friends, and aging parents. The reality is that
some people are actually more sensitive tasters than others.
But those who are more sensitive tasters are not necessarily
better
tasters, chefs, or home cooks. That would be akin to saying that people with perfect vision make the best art critics. I have perfect vision, but know nothing about art. I lack the training, practice, experience, and desire to critique art. If I wanted, I could get training, practice, build my experience, and eventually develop some skill at it. But even training and being born with perfect vision wouldn’t guarantee I’d be a better critic than someone with glasses or contact lenses who has a burning passion for art. Regardless of what your anatomy and genetics have endowed you with, you can be a better taster with training, practice, and a hunger to learn.

The more experience you have tasting a particular food, the better you will be able to recognize and analyze it.
Your ability to identify both tastes and smells improves with repeated exposure.
In other words, the more pinot noir wines you taste, the better you’ll be able to discriminate between them: good versus bad, sweet versus dry, soft versus tannic. The same holds true for types of cheese, chocolate, apples—anything. Practice makes perfect.

For example, I used to wonder what the flavor descriptor
rancid
meant. I knew that the word referred to fats that had gone bad, but I didn’t know what that smelled or tasted like. The key characteristic of rancidity is a subtle odor that is often missed. In rancid meats, it can be described as “warmed over.” Rancid nuts can taste fishy. Rancid oils can smell like waxy crayons. Over the course of my tasting career at Mattson, I have smelled and tasted many rancid foods (another unique job benefit), usually in the ongoing process of tasting foods as they age (yet another benefit). In the early years I asked my more experienced colleagues to point rancidity out to me while I tasted beside them, and I learned what it was. Now when I taste spoiled fats, nuts, or meats, I know immediately that they’re rancid because I’ve improved my ability to perceive this flavor with training and experience.
Taste What You’re Missing
will help you enhance your perception of flavors.

As you become a better taster, you will naturally begin to pay more attention to your food. This in turn can have many benefits beyond enhancing your enjoyment of food. Gerard J. Musante, PhD, founder and director of the weight-loss
facility Structure House Center for Weight Control and Lifestyle Change, says, “If you take your time while eating; if your process of consuming your meal is something you experience moment by moment; if you’re truly aware of what you’re doing at the table—then I believe that mindfulness will leave you more satisfied and less likely to overeat.” Musante’s weight-loss program focuses on teaching people how to transform their relationship with food. Through eating more mindfully, Musante says, “You begin to recognize flavors. You begin to appreciate food for what it is.”

Research that links smell and taste with weight loss has already produced commercial products designed to help people lose weight. But whether you struggle with your weight or not, you can use
Taste What You’re Missing
as a calorie-free way to get more satisfaction from the food you eat. Today, food is everywhere, but if you can feel more confident that you will derive optimal satisfaction from every bite you eat, you’ll be less likely to take unmemorable bites. You won’t waste precious mouthfuls on food that doesn’t taste delicious to you.

Tasting is a complex process. Your preferences actually have a scientific basis and knowing this can help you understand why you eat what you eat. Or don’t. Not only do you live in your own sensory world, your personal life history also affects what you choose to eat. Your food likes and dislikes are not simply a matter of:
I like Brussels sprouts but you don’t. You love eggs, but I can’t stand them.
It’s possible that, if you dislike Brussels sprouts, you are more sensitive to bitter tastes than the average taster. Or it’s possible that you had a bad experience with Brussels sprouts that unconsciously (or consciously) led you to avoid them. I once met a man who couldn’t drink coffee. In his childhood he’d been playing with a coffee display in the grocery store when it fell on top of him, covering him with oily, aromatic roasted coffee beans. The fear and embarrassment of this event had forever influenced the emotions he associated with coffee, leading him to avoid it for the rest of his life in order to avoid experiencing those emotions.

You use all five senses when you’re exposed to food—at the grocery store, the restaurant, or the office, or when you’re inundated with ubiquitous food advertising and marketing. “The senses are so influential on each other that we often don’t know through which sense we’re perceiving the world,” says the University of California Riverside’s Lawrence Rosenblum, who studies how the
senses combine and interact with one another. Once you learn what triggers each sense, you will be more aware of why you respond the way you do.
Taste What You’re Missing
will give you insider knowledge of how food marketers, restaurateurs—even farmers—leverage your instinctual reactions so you can make more informed food choices.

Mostly, I hope this book ignites a culture of taste appreciation. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with the sensory majesty of the meal. I’m not referring to special occasions when you dine at fine restaurants, but to the other 99 percent of your meals: the run-of-the-mill three times a day we eat at home, at work, at school, in the car. We put food in front of children and expect them to eat it, without explaining it to them, without using it to teach them a form of culinary art appreciation, and without encouraging experimentation. The best way to learn about food is to play with it!

When I was in hotel school, my mentor Tom Kelly, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, encouraged frequent dining out and drinking of wine to learn more about each. It worked for me, and I believe that you, too, need to experience firsthand the concepts I write about. To help with this,
Taste What You’re Missing
includes easy interactive exercises to illustrate the sensory concepts in the book. The exercises range from very simple (requiring only one or two ingredients) to more complex (requiring cooking). I hope you’ll take the time to do them with your friends, partners, and children.

My taste awakening started with a tortilla chip, gained momentum with meals at great restaurants, and continues to this day. But you don’t have to be a professional and you certainly don’t have to spend a lot of money these days to have your own glorious food moment. Even now, a decade and a half after becoming a professional food taster, I still find tastes, aromas, and textures in food that imbue me with a sense of wonder: from bites in the lab to mundane breakfasts at home, sandwiches at the airport, salads at my desk, and dinner that I cook for my family—and, hopefully, at the restaurant I’m going to dine in tonight. Every bite is an opportunity for a unique sensory experience.

Since the beginning of this century, a food revolution in the United States has been gaining momentum. We’ve become much more attuned to food, in almost every respect. We want to know where our food comes from. We want to know what variety of tomato or apple we’re eating. We want to know the name
of the farmer who grew it, as well as his farming practices and ethics. When food arrives at the restaurants where we eat, we want to know how it’s handled, stored, and prepared. We want to know not only who cooked it for us, but where he went to culinary school, when he opened his first restaurant, and on what television show he first appeared.

But the revolution shouldn’t stop there.

It’s time that we start to understand what happens
from the plate forward
: as seen by our eyes, smelled by our noses, tasted and felt with our tongues, and heard with our ears. It’s time we acknowledge that merely liking or disliking a food is simple judgment. Food appreciation is something altogether different. If we want to fully experience our food from the path it takes from our plate to our fork to the rest of our body, we need to understand the physical and psychological mechanisms of what makes up
taste.

Taste
happens in your mouth, but that’s only about 20 percent of the story. Food that tastes good also looks good, smells good, feels good, and sounds good. That means a lot of what we think of as
taste
comes through the four nontaste senses. This book will explore just how intertwined all our senses are.

Fifteen years ago, when I was thrown into the world of food development, I wished I had a book that would teach me the most basic science behind what happens when we eat. I hope this one helps you become attuned to a world of tastes, aromas, textures, sights, and sounds—all there at every meal, free for the taking—that you didn’t even know you were missing.

“You have bald spots on your tongue,” the staff told me at a testing laboratory at the University of Florida.

At the moment of this pronouncement, my tongue was stained a brilliant royal blue. I had it smashed up against a glass microscope slide, trying to stick it out as far as it would go because I was afraid that blue saliva would run down my chin or permanently discolor my teeth. The farther I stuck it out, the less I drooled on the paper bib around my neck. The main reason I was in that ridiculous predicament was to make sure the doctoral candidate who was testing me could get a good image of my taste buds with the digital camera. As I sat in the dentist chair, I tried to hold as still as I could be expected to—with my tongue forced out, stuck to a piece of glass. Click! The enormous camera took a magnified picture and minutes later I was given the most devastating diagnosis that a professional food taster could imagine: bald spots on my tongue.

I’m going to have to make a public confession and quit my job at America’s best food development firm,
I thought to myself.
I will no longer be allowed to taste food professionally, which is an important part of what I do for a living. How can this be happening?