The most important
consideration when choosing something to eat is the favor of the food. Flavor
is an attribute of a food that includes its appearance, smell, taste, feel in
the mouth, texture, temperature, and even the sounds made when it is chewed.
Flavor is a combination of all five sense: taste, smell, touch, sight, and
sound. From birth, we have the ability to smell and taste. Most of what we call
taste is really smell, a fact we realize when a cold hits our nasal passages.
Even though the taste buds are working fine, the smell cell are not, and this
dull much of food’s flavor.
Taste comes from 10,000 taste buds-clusters of cells that resemble
the sections of an orange. Taste buds, found on the tongue, cheeks, throat, and
roof of the mouth, house 60 to 100 receptor cells each. The body regenerates
taste buds about every three days. They are most numerous in children under age
six, and this may explain why youngsters are such picky eaters.
These taste cells bind food molecules dissolved in saliva and alert
the brain to interpret them. Although the tongue often is depicted as having
regions that specialize in particular taste sensations-for example, the tip is
said to detect sweetness-researchers know that taste buds for each sensation
(sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami) are actually scattered around the
tongue. In fact, single taste bud can have receptors for all five sensations.
We also know that the back of the tongue is more sensitive to bitter and that
food temperature influences taste.
Umami, the fifth basic taste, differ from the traditional sweet,
sour, salty, and bitter tastes by providing a savory, sometimes meaty
sensation. Umami is Japanese word and the taste is evident in many Japanese
ingredients and flavoring, such as seaweed, dashi stock, and mushrooms, as well
as other foods. The umami taste receptor is every sensitive to glutamate, which
occurs naturally in food such as meat, fish, and milk, and it is often added to
processed foods in the form of the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG).
despite the frequent description of umami as meaty, many foods, including
mushrooms, tomatoes, and parmesan cheese, have a higher level of glutamate than
an equal amount of beef or pork. This explains why foods that are cooked with
mushrooms or tomatoes seem to have a fuller, rounder taste than when cooked
alone.
If you could taste only sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, how
could you taste the flavor of cinnamon, chicken, or any other food? This is
where smell comes in. your ability to identify the flavors of specific foods
requires smell.
The ability to detect the strong scent of a fish market, the
antiseptic odor of a hospital, the aroma of a ripe melon, and thousands of
other smells is possible thanks to a yellowish patch of tissue the size of a
quarter high up in your nose. This patch is actually a layer of 12 million
specialized cell, each sporting 10 to 20 hairlike growths called cilia that bid
with the smell and send message to the brain. Of course, if you have a bad cold
and mucus clogs up your nose, you lose some sense of smell and taste. Our sense
of smell may not be as refined as that
of dogs, which have billions of olfactory cells, but we can distinguish
among about 10,000 scents.
You can smell foods in two ways. If you smell coffee brewing while
you are getting dressed, you smell it directly through your nose. But if you
are drinking coffee, the smell of coffee goes to the back of your mouth and
then up into your nose. To some extent, what
you smell (or taste) is determined by your genetics and also your age.
All foods have texture, a natural texture granted by Mother Nature.
It may be coarse or fine, rough or smooth, tender or tough. Whichever the
texture, it influences whether you like the food. The natural texture of a food
may not be the most desirable texture for a finished dish, and so a cook may
create different texture. For example, a fresh apple may be too crunchy to
serve at dinner, and so it is backed or sautéed for a softer texture. Or a
cream soup may be too him, and so a thickening agent is used to increase the
viscosity of the soup or, simply stated, make it harder to pour.
Food appearance or presentation strongly influences which foods you
choose to eat. Eye appeal is the purpose of food presentation, whether the food
is hot or cold. It is especially important for cold foods because they lack the
come-on of an appetizing aroma. Just the sight of something delicious to eat
can start your digestive juices flowing.
