Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (44 page)

YOU WILL NEED

Coca-Cola or Pepsi

Orange juice

Gatorade

Frappuccino bottled coffee beverage

Milk

Brewed coffee (no cream or sugar added)

Saltine crackers and water to cleanse your palate

DIRECTIONS

The objective of this exercise is to place the beverages in order of increasing sourness, or decreasing pH. (They are the same thing!)

The key is on
page 240
.

YOU WILL NEED

Masking tape and marker

4 glasses

2 cups of water, plus more for cleansing

2 cups lemon juice (freshly squeezed is best, but any kind will work)

1 nonreactive saucepan

Liquid measuring cup

6 tablespoons sugar

Spoon

Saltine crackers for cleansing your palate

DIRECTIONS

1. Using the tape and marker, mark the glasses 1 through 4.

2. Combine the water and lemon juice in the saucepan and stir. Measure ½ cup into glass number 1 and place it in the refrigerator.

3. Heat the remaining lemon-water mixture over medium heat for about 2 minutes—do not boil. You just want it hot enough to dissolve sugar, not to bubble or boil (which would concentrate the mixture).

4. Add 2 tablespoons sugar and stir until dissolved. Pour ½ cup of the mixture into glass number 2 and place it in the refrigerator.

5. Stir another 2 tablespoons sugar into the liquid until completely dissolved. Pour ½ cup into glass number 3 and place it in the refrigerator.

6. Stir the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar into the liquid until completely dissolved. Pour into glass number 4 and place in the refrigerator.

7. Let lemonades chill for about 1 hour before tasting.

TASTE

• Taste the unsweetened lemonade (number 1) first. Notice how sour it tastes.

• Cleanse your palate with saltines and water.

• Taste the next three lemonades in order of increasing sweetness, cleansing your palate between tastings with saltines and water.

OBSERVE

• Notice how the sugar totally changes the way you perceive the sourness.

• All 4 glasses have the same level of sourness: in other words, the same pH value. The only difference is the level of sugar, or °Brix.

Part 1 Answer:

In order of increasing sweetness, the beverages stack up as follows:

Part 2 Answer:

In order of increasing sourness, the beverages stack up as follows:
²²

This exercise will give you an understanding of what different pH levels translate to in the mouth. You will be making three different saltwater solutions. The reason we use salt water is that the alkaline
ingredient, baking soda, contains sodium. We have to add the same amount of sodium to the other two samples to equalize the salty taste across all three samples.

YOU WILL NEED

Masking tape and marker

3 glasses

Measuring spoons

Table salt

Liquid measuring cup

Hot water

Baking soda (which is pure sodium bicarbonate)

Distilled white vinegar

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing your palate

DIRECTIONS

1. Mark one glass “Neutral pH,” the second glass “Alkaline,” and the third glass “Acidic.”

2. Make the neutral salt water: Add ⅛ teaspoon salt to the “Neutral” glass. Add 1 cup hot water and stir until dissolved.

3. Make the alkaline salt water: Add ½ teaspoon baking soda to the “Alkaline” glass. Add 1 cup hot water and stir until dissolved.

4. Make the acidic salt water: Add ⅛ teaspoon salt to the “Acidic” glass. Add ¼ teaspoon vinegar. Add 1 cup hot water and stir until dissolved.

5. Taste the neutral pH water first.

6. Cleanse your palate with saltines and plain water.

7. Taste the alkaline water next.

8. Cleanse your palate with saltines and plain water.

9. Taste the acidic water next.

10. Cleanse your palate with saltines and plain water.

OBSERVE

1. All three samples will taste salty.

2. The acidic water will taste sour.

3. The alkaline water will taste slightly soapy, slightly odd. That’s because we don’t eat many foods in the alkaline range.

I believe that there is at least one other additional taste which is quite distinct from the four tastes. It is the peculiar taste . . . arising from fish, meat, and so forth.

Kikunae Ikeda, 1909

C
hef Stan Frankenthaler spends many of his waking and semiwaking hours thinking about food.

“I get in trouble all the time with my wife for daydreaming about food,” he says.

He’s been cooking since he was a child, when his parents would allow him to concoct elaborate meals for the family. In his teens and throughout his time at the University of Georgia he worked as a professional cook, and he went to
work in restaurants after he graduated. In the early 1980s he went to cooking school at The Culinary Institute of America, finishing first in his class.

Afterward, Frankenthaler headed to Boston and jumped behind the stoves of some of the city’s most famous hotels and restaurateurs, including Le Meridien, Lydia Shire, and Jasper White. His cooking earned him James Beard Award nominations for Best Chef Northeast. By the time he opened his own places, The Blue Room and Salamander, he had become known for fusing American cuisine with Asian flavors and wrote a cookbook of Asian-inspired recipes.

Umami is the fifth Basic Taste and it is at the core of Asian cuisine. Yet Frankenthaler, an Asian kitchen veteran, had not heard of this word until the early 1990s. Like most chefs, he knew
that taste
, but he had not had a word for it.

“It was a coming to consciousness, almost. There was a definition—oral definition—that came into being, for something that I’d always done. My experience was more, ‘Oh, now it has a name,’” he said. Finally, he had a word for
that taste.

English is a rich language with many more words than we use in daily life. Yet English sometimes lets us down where other languages pinpoint a concept with a single word. The French word
terroir
(pronounced tare-WAH) is a perfect example. Terroir, which literally means “soil” in French, communicates so much that it’s hard to believe that seven letters can contain it all.

Terroir refers to the specific conditions in which wine grapes (most usually, but also other agricultural products) grow. Geography influences the climate in which the grapes go from sprout to ripe fruit. For example, warm weather can result in sweeter grapes, which can mean bolder, higher-alcohol wines. Geography also accounts for differences in soil, culture, and farming techniques, which inform winemaking methods. Basically, terroir communicates the essence of what makes a grape taste the way it does, and the reason that the grape yields a wine that tastes the way it does.

The French
get
wine. They have the perfect word that enables their understanding of it, whereas we English speakers need a paragraph or so to explain the same concept.

Many Japanese understand umami in the same way the French understand terroir. They
get
it. English speakers haven’t grown up with the word, so we don’t use it in conversation as we do the other four tastes. Nor has the word
umami
made its way into colloquial food phrases such as “my
sweet
heart,” “a
bitter
pill to swallow,” “
salt
of the earth,” or “
sour
grapes.” Umami is a difficult concept to describe and an even harder taste to identify.

Three umami compounds occur in nature: glutamate, disodium inosinate (aka IMP), and disodium guanylate (aka GMP).