Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey Page B

you’ll easily detect the two Basic Tastes evident in it: sweet and sour. Once you release your nostrils, the aromas of it will spring forth: tropical, cherry, pear, melon, buttered popcorn. The flavor of the jelly bean you’ve chosen is the combination of the two Basic Tastes, the signature aromas of whatever flavor you’ve chosen, and the texture, chewy-tender.
    Of course, you don’t have to use a jelly bean to isolate the taste from the aroma of a food. Use a cherry tomato or fig or strawberry and you’ll experience the same thing. With your nose pinched shut, you’ll detect very little of the characteristic flavor of what’s in your mouth. You’ll get only sweet, sour, bitter, salt, or umami. Release your nostrils, breathe, and then you will get the aromas of tomato, fig, or strawberry.
    In Taste What You’re Missing , I’m going to use plain English and say, “when you taste a tomato” even though I may be talking about the total multisensorial experience of eating a tomato. But I will also use (and recommend the common usage of) the term savor as a verb when the word taste is scientifically incorrect. For example, “When you savor a tomato, you get the green aroma first, followed by the basic tastes sweet and sour.” We usually think of savoring something as consuming it with delight. But Merriam-Webster defines the verb savor as “to have experience of,” so savor really does work in sentences where the word taste is incorrect.
    The linguistic tendency to use the word taste to mean flavor is not an idiosyncrasyof the English language. University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Rozin asked bilingual speakers of nine languages to provide synonyms for the words taste and flavor . They were given a dictionary to see if they could find better words. And then they were educated on the difference between the Basic Tastes and aroma. In seven of the nine languages (Spanish, German, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese), it appears that this same idiosyncrasy exists, so that if it goes in the mouth, it’s tasted. Only Hungarian and French seemed to have words that hinted at a distinction between the concept of taste versus that of taste plus aroma: what you know now is flavor.
    The word for flavor in French is, not coincidentally, saveur.
     
    Sensory Snack
    Taste and smell are the only two senses we confuse. Imagine someone saying, “When I heard that Renoir, I was really moved.” or “I like to watch the radio.” It just doesn’t happen.
The Five Basic Tastes
    Once you learn the five building blocks of taste, you will see how they work in harmony with the other senses and start thinking more critically about what you’re tasting. Four are familiar to most people: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. The fifth, umami (pronounced ōō a-mä’mē, which rhymes with “who MAH me”) is a newer term, imported from Japan, which is loosely translated as savory, brothy, meaty, delicious, or round. Umami refers to the savory taste of certain proteins that make a good beef steak or soup stock taste so rich and full. If you were to take all the salt out of chicken or beef broth, you’d be left with umami. It isn’t a taste we crave on its own. It really needs to be paired with salt. More about this complicated taste later in the book.
    These five Basic Tastes are the only tastes that we can detect using our sense of taste without support from any other sense. For now, think about them as the five tips of a star. Throughout the book I’ll be using the star as a tool to help you form a visual representation of how inextricably linked each taste is with the others, as well as how important all five senses are when you’re experiencing food.

    The Taste Star: The Five Basic Tastes

    The Sensory Star: The Five Senses
    I use the star shape because it’s perfectly balanced, which is how I think about the five tastes: there isn’t one taste that’s more important than the others for making food taste good. Not