Your tastes might favor just a bit more in flavor

Your tastes might favor just a bit more in flavor

This article was in the Milwaukee Journal January 11, 2009. By SHIRLEY O. CORRIHER We all want our food to be delicious. Here are some easy ways to make basic home-cooked dinners taste wonderful. Taste and flavor We use the terms “taste” and “ flavor” interchange­ably, but actually they are different. Taste refers to the five tastes that trigger recep­tors in our mouth: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (pronounced oo-MOM-ee). Flavor, by contrast, means the whole experience — aroma, texture, mouth feel, temperature, color — all the things that influence our perception of foods. These five tastes are basic to our being and are very powerful. All animals (in­cluding humans) are born with taste receptors that contribute to our survival, guiding us to what we should or should not eat. Sweet indi­cates energy-giving carbo­hydrates. Salty indicates life-sustaining minerals. Umami indicates life-giving proteins. Bitterness warns of toxicity — all natural tox­ins are bitter. Sour may indi­cate onset of spoilage — pro­ceed with caution. For hundreds of years, good cooks have instinctive­ly added a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar to send our salty and sweet taste recep­tors zinging. Adding three of these basic tastes (salty, sweet and umami) can be easy and can be a major step toward delicious dishes. You do not need much; just a small amount can produce a major influence on flavors. Salty Realize that some salt is essential to our survival. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers died on the march back from Russia simply because they did not have enough salt in their diet for their wounds to heal. Salt has complex indirect influences on flavor. Pastry chefs have always said, “add a pinch of salt to desserts to bring out the sweetness.” Gary Beauchamp, direc­tor of Monell Chemical Sens­es Center in Philadelphia il­lustrates the interplay be­tween salt and sweetness. Beauchamp shows a dia­gram representing bitter­ness in a dish. When sugar is added, the bitterness drops significantly so that sweet­ness and bit­terness are about equal in strength. Then, he adds a little salt. The bitterness drops to al­most nothing and there is only sweetness left. To experience this, taste tonic water, which has both bitter quinine and sweet­ness to moderate it. Pour out two samples of the tonic wa­ter. Taste one plain; to the second sample, add a pinch of salt. Amazingly, bitter­ness is dramatically re­duced and the sample is al­most like sugar water! When you think about salt reducing bitterness, you have probably experienced it many times. You have seen people put salt on grapefruit to reduce bitterness. Sweet Sugar has complex indi­rect influences on flavor, too. Researchers at the Univer­sity of Nottingham in Eng­land can analyze the gases present in the nasal cavity. They gave test subjects gum with mint and sugar and asked them to chew until the flavor was gone. When sub­jects reported the flavor gone, in fact there was still mint in their nasal cavity. They were then given sugar and the mint flavor re­turned. A friend from the UK said that as children when their gum ran out of flavor, they rolled it in the family sugar dish and it was like new. As little as ½ teaspoon of sugar in a dish can make an amazing taste difference. Umami Adding a food that trig­gers umami receptors can make a dish sensational. Umami is described as ev­erything from meaty, sa­vory, to essence, “yummy,” “tasty,” delicious, perfect ripeness — a perfection in taste that sends one into a state of ecstasy. The umami taste is pro­duced by a number of natu­rally occurring compounds — salts of glutamic acid (glu­tamates) and nucleotides. Nucleotides are composed of a small piece of protein and a non-protein part. Both gluta­mates and nucleotides are small, flavorful molecules, not huge proteins. Synergism The important thing to know about umami is that umami­taste- producing compounds have a magnifying effect on each other. A mixture of 50% glutamate and 50% umami nu­cleotide produc­es eight times as much flavor as either of the uma­mi compounds alone. In their book “The Fifth Taste,” Anna and David Ka­sabian give an excellent list — The Umami Pantry — of things that you can keep on hand in the pantry or refrig­erator to give a shot of uma­mi to dishes. These are: Worcestershire, soy sauce (naturally fermented), Asian fish sauce, Parmigia­no- Reggiano cheese, dried shiitake mushrooms and canned tomatoes. (I would include ketchup, which is concentrated sweetened to­matoes.) For maximum flavor, use both a glutamate and a nu­cleotide source of umami.