What is Flavor …?

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.