Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (47 page)

To do this exercise, you will need to buy the pure form of umami, monosodium glutamate. You can find this under the brand name Acćent, usually sold in the spice aisle. Since Acćent (like all MSG) contains sodium (that’s the monosodium part of it), you’ll need to compare it against the same amount of sodium minus the umami. This would be salt.

You can do this exercise with any type of salt, but most salts vary slightly in terms of sodium content. If you use Morton salt, which I’m recommending because of its broad availability, I’ve done the calculations for you. If you use another salt, you’ll need to make sure that you’re tasting identical amounts of sodium in each mixture.

YOU WILL NEED

Measuring spoons

Table salt (not iodized)

2 liquid-cup measures

Accent flavor enhancer or any other pure form of MSG

Warm water

Spoons for tasting

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing your palate

DIRECTIONS

1. Measure ⅛ teaspoon salt into the first cup. Measure ¾ teaspoon Accent into the second cup. Fill each cup with warm water to the ⅔ cup line. Stir both with a clean spoon until the crystals are dissolved.

TASTE

• Taste the salt water first. It should taste salty, like warm ocean water.

• Cleanse your palate with crackers and water.

• Taste the umami water next. You will taste salt, as you did with the salty water, but there’s another taste in this sample. That taste is umami. Notice how it tastes meatier and brothier than the salty water. Also notice that the flavor fills your mouth and lasts a long time. These are the flavor-enhancing properties of umami.

DISCUSS

• Umami (in the form of free glutamates) occurs naturally in foods such as beef, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, and seaweed.

• Umami is also a critical flavor component of foods such as soup, ketchup, soy sauce, and fish sauce.

• See if you can now pick out the taste of umami when you eat one of these foods.

YOU WILL NEED

Naturally brewed soy sauce (Kikkoman or other)

Vegemite

Worcestershire sauce

Ketchup

Fermented fish sauce (Thai or Vietnamese)

Grated Parmesan cheese

Ramekins or small bowls

Spoons for tasting

Saltine crackers and water for cleansing your palate

DIRECTIONS

1. Let the ingredients come to room temperature. When they’re at room temperature you’ll be able to detect more volatile aromas.

2. Portion out a small amount of each ingredient into a ramekin or bowl.

TASTE

• Observe and sample each ingredient and note the Basic Tastes present in each one.

• Note any aromas or Irritastes.

• Cleanse your palate between samples.

• Now go back and retaste them, concentrating on the savory umami in each.

DISCUSS

• What words would you use to describe umami?

• What do the aromas add to umami?

• Which ingredient do you prefer? Why?

YOU WILL NEED

Young, fresh cheese (be sure it is not smoked)

An aged cheese (at least 18 months old)

Plastic wrap

Fresh Roma tomatoes, 2 quarters for each person tasting

Fresh cremini mushrooms, 2 halves for each person tasting

Serated knife

Baking sheet

Saltine crackers for cleansing your palate

Water

DIRECTIONS

CHEESE

1. Shave the fresh cheese into thin sheets, ideally about 1 inch square. Cover with plastic wrap.

2. Shave the aged cheese into thin sheets, ideally about 1 inch square. Cover with plastic wrap.

ROMA TOMATO, RAW

3. Cut half of the Roma tomatoes into quarters. Remove the seeds and pulp so that just the flesh remains.

ROMA TOMATO, ROASTED

4. Cut the remaining Roma tomatoes into quarters. Remove the seeds and pulp so that just the flesh remains.

5. Roast on baking sheet, without added fat or seasoning, for 30 minutes at 400°F. Cool.

MUSHROOM, RAW

6. Clean half the mushrooms and cut in half lengthwise.

MUSHROOM, ROASTED

7. Clean the remaining mushrooms and cut in half lengthwise.

8. Roast on baking sheet, without added fat or seasoning, for 30 minutes at 400°F. Cool.

TASTE AND DISCUSS

• Sample the cheeses first: young first, then aged. Notice the pronounced umami character of the aged cheese.

• Cleanse your palate with saltines and water.

• Sample the tomatoes next: fresh first, then roasted. Notice the pronounced umami character of the roasted tomato.

• Cleanse your palate with saltines and water.

• Sample the mushrooms next: fresh first, then roasted. Notice the pronounced umami character of the roasted mushroom.

• Can you isolate the umami taste from the cheese, tomato, and mushroom? It adds the depth of flavor that’s common to them.

W
hen I was new to my job at Mattson, I was dropped into the frozen french fry business like a basket of Tater Tots. Our new client wanted ideas for frozen side dishes to sell to restaurants and, given my background in the food service industry, I was deemed the person for the job. Before the brainstorming began, I had to learn everything there is to know about America’s number one side dish.

In my youth, my mother used to serve homemade french fries on rare, coveted occasions, but the quantities she made were always short of our appetites. When I first made them I realized why: they require a lot of tedious preparation, cutting, blanching, soaking, frying, and frying again. Because of this, many restaurants buy them cut, partially fried, and frozen. I had no idea how the commercial version of the process worked, so I took a trip up to Caldwell, Idaho, to visit Simplot, the place where frozen french fries were born. In 1967, former potato farmer and eventual magnate J. R. “Jack” Simplot made a handshake deal with Ray Kroc to supply Kroc’s burgeoning McDonald’s restaurant chain; the rest is crispy golden history.

In one fascinating, awe-inspiring, and informative day, I learned what types of peeling, cooking, and freezing processes my wacky ideas would be subject to, from the time the farmers delivered the dirt-caked spuds until they left Idaho in
a freezer truck. After touring the 1940s-era manufacturing plant, I wearily made my way back to the Boise airport. I got suspicious looks from the security guards and more at the ticket counter, along with a couple of noses wrinkled in disdain. Was it my urban clothing? My unusually short hair? I made sure I didn’t have green stuff stuck between my front teeth. When I finally boarded the flight and sat down, I thought I would be free of judgmental gazes. At that point I heard a buzz from all around me.
Who has the fries? I didn’t know there was a McDonald’s in the terminal. Does it smell like McDonald’s in here to you? Oh, man, I could really go for some french fries.
I had been getting odd looks because I reeked of fried food.

Foods with fat simply savor better. For as long as we’ve practiced the art of cooking, humans have known that fat works wonders. In ancient Greece, Aristotle documented the “fatty” taste and characterized it as the opposite of salty, anointing it with salt-like legitimacy in his writings. Fat affects the appearance of foods so profoundly that you can easily tell which of two glasses of milk has more fat simply by picking the one that’s whiter or more opaque. You can also distinguish between a lean and fat steak visually, based solely on the amount of white fat marbling.

Fat affects the mouthfeel of foods, making them creamier and allowing them to carry flavors longer. And fat affects aroma, changing the earthy, starchy flavor of a raw potato into the familiar, crave-able smell my seatmates might have termed
McDonald’s-y
. Sensory scientists these days think something else might be happening when we eat fat, something that we’re not even consciously aware of.

Many researchers are convinced we
taste
fat and, as a result, fat should be considered a Basic Taste. According to Purdue University’s Rick Mattes, “Free fatty acids don’t turn on the other four senses. There appear to be dedicated receptors to capture those unique fatty acid stimuli.” And perhaps most convincingly, he notes that “if you cut the taste nerve in animals [mice], you block responses to fats so it seems that the message is carried by the gustatory system.”

This rocked my entire understanding of fat’s contribution to food. Clearly fat has an amazing effect on the texture, appearance, and aroma of food. When potatoes are deep-fried, their texture, appearance, and aroma change in ways that stimulate our reptilian brain and tell us that these are not just any old potatoes: they’re calorie dense, which Mother Nature has wired us to love and to seek out to nourish ourselves (or overnourish ourselves, as we do today). But I hadn’t considered that fat could have a unique
taste
, as Mattes is trying to prove.

However, isolating the
taste
of fat from its texture is extremely difficult. You can clamp subjects’ noses to eliminate fat’s aroma, but taste is a
contact sense
.
This means that in order to
taste
something, it has to come in contact with your tongue. As a result, there’s no way to
taste
fat without
feeling
it.

To get around this, Mattes has tried to mimic the mouthfeel of fat with replacers such as gums, starches, even Olestra (a fat replacer developed by Procter & Gamble). If he could successfully create a fatty-mouthfeel “match,” he could isolate the
taste
of fat from any
texture
it possesses by determining whether testers could
taste
the difference between a real fat and a fake fat sample. But this is not so easily done!

Witness the hundreds of companies that tried to sell fat-free products in the nineties and failed. Even Olestra, which has an incredibly authentic fatty mouthfeel, behaves differently in the mouth than fat does. There’s a reason that the ice cream aisle of today contains zero brands of zero-fat ice cream. Fat replacers are a far cry from the real thing. Because it’s impossible to create a fake fat texture that perfectly mimics real fat texture, people can
feel
the difference, confounding Mattes’s research on taste.

Describing Fattiness in Food

(Note That They All Refer to Mouthfeel, Not Taste.)