Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (39 page)

3 slices thick-cut smoked bacon (umami, salt)

Seasoned rice vinegar (sweet, sour, salt)

Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce (salt, sweet, umami)

Sugar (sweet)

Salt (salt)

Mild cooking oil such as canola or soybean

A heavy flat-bottomed skillet: do not use nonstick, as it won’t allow you to develop the browning that this recipe requires

A large stockpot

A cutting board

A chef’s knife

DIRECTIONS

1. Bring 6 quarts water to a boil in the stockpot. While the boil is rolling, slowly drop the sprouts into the water, trying to keep the boil going. After the rolling boil returns full-force, boil the sprouts for exactly 3 minutes and then immediately drain well. Let cool.

2. When the Brussels sprouts are cool enough to handle, cut in half, cutting through the stem so that they stay together instead of falling apart (which will happen if you cut the tops off from the bottoms).

3. In the skillet, cook the bacon over medium to medium-high heat. The objective is to slowly crisp the bacon while rendering out as much fat as possible.

4. Remove the crisp, browned bacon from the pan when it’s done. When cool, crumble. Set aside.

5. Do not drain all of the bacon fat. Instead, pour half of the it into a glass measuring cup. Set aside. Half the fat, about 2 to 3 tablespoons, should remain in the skillet.

You can do the above a day ahead and finish the sprouts to order.

6. Bring 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat up to high heat in the skillet.

7. Add the sprouts to the pan cut side down in a single layer. Be sure there’s enough fat in the pan to get a good, dark color going on the cut side of the sprouts. If not, add a bit more bacon fat or oil.

8. Do not shake the pan. Do not move any of the other sprouts. The temptation to do so will be great. Resist! You will not get a properly crisped, brown edge unless you let them stay in the pan a few minutes beyond the point when you think they’re done. If they look as though they’re burning, good. That’s what you want to see. Let them burn!

9. Pick your test sprout. After 4 to 5 minutes, see how this little guy is doing. You want the flat edge dark and crispy. Continue to brown and crisp all the sprouts in the pan one layer at a time.

10. When the sprouts are done, turn the heat off.

11. Toss the sprouts in the pan with a spritz of fish sauce. Taste.

12. Add the crumbled bacon and a shake or three of vinegar. Taste.

13. Add just the right amount of sugar. Taste.

14. Add just the right amout of salt. Taste.

15. Continue to adjust until the balance of bitter, salt, sweet, sour, and umami is just about right.

Of course you’ve tasted coffee before. But this time stop, slow down, and taste coffee again as if for the first time. Pay attention to all five Basic Tastes. Use all five of your senses. Each time you taste, evaluate:

1. Appearance

2. Aroma

3. Taste

4. Texture

5. Sound

YOU WILL NEED

A cup of black coffee

Sugar

Creamer or milk (your choice of fat level)

DIRECTIONS

1. Take a sip of coffee. Notice how bitter it is. Consider the acidity of the coffee. How sour is it?

2. Add a small amount of sugar to the coffee. How much? Just about the right amount. Now taste it. Notice how the bitterness has changed.

3. Add a little bit more sugar to the coffee. Taste it again. Consider how the bitterness changed this time.

4. Now add the creamer to the coffee, about 1 tablespoon at a time. Stop and taste it after each additional tablespoon. Notice what the creamer did to the bitterness of the coffee.

5. Also notice what the creamer does to the sourness of the coffee. The pH of coffee is lower than milk (coffee is
more
sour than milk). When you add milk to coffee you raise the pH level of the resulting drink, making it less sour.

YOU WILL NEED

A bunch of seedless grapes in the darkest color you can find. Red will work, but black is even better.

DIRECTIONS

1. Wash the grapes. Put one in your mouth and suck on it. Do not bite it.

2.
Without using your teeth
, smash the grape up against the roof of your mouth. Try to remove the interior flesh from skin of the grape.

3.
Without using your teeth
, suck on the grape parts until the flesh is gone and you are left with just the grape skin.

4. Begin to chew the grape skin, slowly. Keep chewing until you start to experience a certain change in mouthfeel.

OBSERVE

The sensation that you are getting is the drying of astringency. It comes from the tannin in the skins of the grape.

YOU WILL NEED

Masking tape and markers

2 ramekins or cups

1 lemon for each person tasting

A citrus juicer

1 clear glass liquid measuring cup

Table salt

Spoons

Sharp knife or vegetable peeler

Saltine crackers and cold water for cleansing your palate

DIRECTIONS

1. Put a label that says Juice + Salt on one ramekin.

2. Juice the lemons into the measuring cup. Divide the juice evenly into the 2 ramekins.

3. To the Juice + Salt ramekin, add 1 pinch of salt for each lemon you juiced. Stir well to dissolve.

4. Cut off bits of lemon rind so that each taster gets enough to chew for a few seconds. Be sure to include the white pith as well as the yellow skin. Set aside.

TASTE

5. Taste the plain juice first. What you are experiencing is mainly sour. There might be a tiny bit of sweetness or bitterness in the juice, but the big, bold, intense flavor you are tasting is sour.

6. If there was any bitterness in your lemon juice, the touch of salt should mask it. Taste the Juice + Salt. Now we can say for sure that what you are tasting is almost purely sour.

7. Now put the lemon rind in your mouth and chew on it for 30 seconds before spitting it out. The taste you’re experiencing now is bitter. It is strong and intense like sour, but it is of a different quality.

8. Cleanse your palate with crackers and water and go back and forth a few times to really understand the difference.

W
hen I was a child in the 1970s, women drank Tab, the beverage of choice for fashion-conscious, forward-thinking, good-looking people. Tab told us so. The word
beautiful
appeared in two of the product’s advertising slogans during that decade. Tab was the first sugar-free soda to be marketed by the Coca-Cola Company and was sweetened with saccharin, a substance that’s five hundred times sweeter than sugar. Saccharin is so intensely sweet that Coke had to use only a minuscule amount of it to craft a beverage with the same sweetness as a regular Coca-Cola. The company marketed it, cleverly, as having only one calorie.

But not every cola-drinking woman switched from regular Coke to Tab. Some women who wanted to switch to a lower-calorie cola just couldn’t bring themselves to drink Tab because of the taste.

The two characteristic Basic Tastes in cola are sweet and sour. You probably don’t think of cola as tasting sour, because much of its acidity comes from the carbonation, or carbonic acid, which feels tingly as well as tasting sour, and the prickly bubble irritaste distracts you from thinking about the sourness on your tongue. On the other hand, most people do think of cola as tasting
sweet. Once you mess with the sweetness of a drink like Coca-Cola, you’re left with a different thing altogether. Sucrose, otherwise known as sugar—which was used to sweeten cola in the seventies—is the prototypical sweet taste. It is the purest, cleanest expression of the Basic Taste sweet. Sugar-free Tab had its work cut out for it.

Today we have a few more sugar-free alternatives to Tab, which is still available if you look hard enough. There’s Diet Coke, sweetened with aspartame (200 times sweeter than sugar), Diet Coke with Splenda (600 times sweeter than sugar), and Coke Zero, which is sweetened with a blend of aspartame (200 times sweeter than sugar) and acesulfame potassium (abbreviated aceK, 180 times sweeter than sugar). There was even a short-lived Coke product called C2 that was sweetened with a blend of high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose. Although I have no insider knowledge, I’ll bet right now they’re working on a few more sugar-free cola versions with new and different sweeteners.

Why do beverage companies keep pursuing sugar-free soft drinks? The problem is that no other sweetener tastes exactly like sugar. It’s not that saccharin was a bad choice for Tab. It’s that trying to replace sugar with
anything
else is problematic. Due to our genetic and anatomical individuality, we all perceive sweetness a little bit differently, and each sweetener has its own
sweetness flavor display
or
sweetness profile
, terms we use to describe how we perceive its unique sweetness. This makes it nearly impossible to create a sugar-free drink that everyone will accept.