This is a big question and plenty of material to write a whole book. So please bear with me as I rip through it in a few hundred words.
Taste
Scientists might argue with this – but for cooks it’s good enough to know that we only experience 5 tastes in our mouth: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, umami.
Balancing these tastes is a factor in most famous flavour combinations. Think of salty chips splashed with vinegar, or the interplay of salt, sweet and sour in Thai curries. The bitterness of heavily charred steak is usually balanced with a lavish amount of salt.
Umami is a slightly trickier taste to pin down. It’s the savouriness that we’re familiar with in fish sauce, mushrooms, tomatoes and parmesan among others. It’s how we experience glutamate compounds in food and it is much used, abused and misunderstood in the form of powdered MSG.
The finessing of a dish may well be what makes it great – but these five tastes will be its foundations.
Smell
The vast majority of flavours we experience are sensed in the nose, not the mouth. Whether by smelling it directly, or by a process called retronasal olfaction (which is essentially the aromas travelling from your mouth to your nose, via the back of your throat).
Anything that is not one of the above 5 tastes (salt, sour etc) is sensed in the nose: you name it – strawberry, coffee, cheese, mint, roasted lamb, truffle…all smells, not tastes.
Some estimates put the number of different smells we can identify at over a trillion. That would take a while to test, but it’s fair to say that whatever the final number – it will be a big one.
The dominance of smell over taste is well exemplified by wine tasters who spend most of their time smelling, not drinking the wine. You can also see the importance of retronasal olfaction from their occasionally-repulsive slurping and gargling of the liquid – it’s all designed to aerate the wine and get those aromas to the back of the throat and up the nose.
Recently researchers have noted the fact that the experience of smell through the mouth (retronasal olfaction) can be quite different to smelling something directly. Hence cheeses that smell abominable can taste amazing, and drinking coffee rarely delivers on the great promise of its smell.
Texture
When we say something is delicious, we’re very often referring to the texture. What makes a great roast potato? Or fried chicken? Or loaf of bread? The thing that separates delicious from ‘okay’ is the texture.
A good wine buyer will know this all too well. The entry level wine on a restaurant list will nearly always be lacking in any real interest in terms of flavour complexity or length – but a pleasing texture is enough to keep most of us happy, so that’s what they go for.
Desirable textures change completely depending on what you’re eating or drinking. The main thing is to be aware of how important texture is to a meal, and make your decisions with this in mind.
Trigeminal/irritants
Fizziness, hot and cold, cooling menthol or burning chilli, the numb tingling from Sichuan pepper, and the nose burning of too much mustard on your roast beef – all of these are trigeminal sensations.
They’re not smells, tastes or textures but they’re certainly important. They can lift your food or ruin it.
Many of these sensations depend on mildly damaging the cells in our mouth and nose. Judged correctly it has a similar pleasure/pain stimulus to a slightly-too-fast descent on a bicycle, or a scary fairground ride. But overdo it and it becomes more like a being mugged at knife point.
These sensations are addictive and the effect lessens with overuse – hence that one friend who seems to need Tabasco on her cornflakes.
Sound
Is sound really important?
In some respects yes: excessive noise can certainly ruin your enjoyment of a meal, and I could never eat while wearing headphones. It does seem to dull the senses.
But overall I think it’s a footnote to the story of taste.
Definitely the crunch of the first bite of an apple, or the crisp snapping of a carrot is satisfying, but I’m not so sure that it’s entirely separate from our enjoyment of texture. Equally the sound of champagne fizzing on your tongue is – to me – the enjoyment of the texture (or trigeminal sensation) more than the sound.
Being poked with a stick, or stroked with a feather while you eat will change your experience of the meal – but I’m not sure I’d call it part of our sense of taste.
I’m undecided on this one.
All of this would be a hell of a lot to actively think about every time you set out to cook a meal, or eat one. But over time it can become ingrained in your thinking and help you to make more balanced and interesting dishes. Particularly if you make a point of always actively tasting your food.
All of this would be a hell of a lot to actively think about every time you set out to cook a meal, or eat one. But over time it can become ingrained in your thinking and help you to make more balanced and interesting dishes. Particularly if you make a point of always actively tasting your food.