Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (9 page)

Once you learn the five building blocks of taste, you will see how they work in harmony with the other senses and start thinking more critically about what you’re tasting. Four are familiar to most people: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. The fifth, umami (pronounced
ōō
a-mä’mē, which rhymes with “who MAH me”) is a newer term, imported from Japan, which is loosely translated as savory, brothy, meaty, delicious, or round. Umami refers to the savory taste of certain proteins that make a good beef steak or soup stock taste so rich and full. If you were to take all the salt out of chicken or beef broth, you’d be left with umami. It isn’t a taste we crave on its own. It really needs to be paired with salt. More about this complicated taste later in the book.

These five Basic Tastes are the only tastes that we can detect using our sense of taste without support from any other sense. For now, think about them as the five tips of a star. Throughout the book I’ll be using the star as a tool to help you form a visual representation of how inextricably linked each taste is with the others, as well as how important all five senses are when you’re experiencing food.

The Taste Star: The Five Basic Tastes

The Sensory Star: The Five Senses

I use the star shape because it’s perfectly balanced, which is how I think about the five tastes: there isn’t one taste that’s more important than the others for making food taste good. Not every food should contain all five Basic Tastes. And not every food should contain all five in equal proportions. Take wine, for example. Most wines contain the sour and bitter tastes. Some wines are sweet. But almost no wines are salty. And this is a good thing: it doesn’t belong.

When you’re cooking or seasoning a dish, it is important to make sure that one taste doesn’t dominate the others, whether all five tastes are present or not. When one taste (or aroma) dominates, we say that the dish is out of balance; the way the star would be if one of the points were bigger than the others. A wine that tasted salty would definitely be out of balance.

When one taste is out of balance, it throws off the whole food, dish, or drink.

It’s fairly easy to recognize a dish that’s out of balance from too much salt or bitterness, because it will be unpleasant (as a salty wine would be). What’s harder to identify is a dish with too much umami or savoriness. When you become more familiar with umami, you’ll be able to tell when there’s too much of it. Let’s review the five Basic Tastes very broadly; then for each Basic Taste we will go into more depth in its own chapter.

Sweet

Sweet
is the term we use for simple carbohydrate compounds such as sucrose, more commonly known as sugar. Almost universally, people describe sweet tastes as pleasant. While sugar is the purest form of this taste, lots of other things naturally taste sweet, such as fruit (which contains fructose) and dairy products (which contain lactose). Sugar is a quick source of calories, so we are genetically predisposed to seek out sweet things.

Sour

We use the term
sour
to describe the taste of acidity. Lemon juice and vinegar are two of the most prevalent sources of sourness in food; both liquids are high in acid (citric acid in the case of lemon juice, acetic acid in the case of vinegar). Acidity is usually pleasant but can quickly become unpleasant at high levels; a squeeze of lemon can brighten up the flavor of grilled fish or a glass of iced tea, but straight lemon juice is mouth-puckeringly unpleasant. Some people, however, love the extreme sourness of lemons so much that they suck on lemons repeatedly. This can cause the enamel on their teeth to erode if they do it often
enough for a long enough period of time. In a pretty nifty design—compliments of Mother Nature—most people find that foods with tooth-rotting acid levels are too sour to eat.

Some acids make foods and beverages taste fresh and bright, whereas other acids indicate spoilage and can trigger instant rejection of those foods. Acids also help preserve some foods, such as pickles.

Bitter

Individual tolerance varies more widely for bitter foods than for any of the other Basic Tastes. Bitter foods can be very unpleasant on their own if they are not balanced by other tastes and flavors. Coffee, tea, and red wine are common bitter beverages that can be delicious when carefully crafted. Most compounds with medicinal effects have a bitter taste—some at low levels, some at high levels. Our ability to taste bitterness has evolved to help us identify substances that can be toxic. Caffeine, for instance, is extremely bitter. It has a very real, well-recognized medicinal benefit—stimulation—but at high levels it can be toxic. Many poisons taste bitter and their medicinal effect—death—is one you probably want to avoid. That’s why it makes sense that humans have a complicated, distrustful view of bitter tastes.

Salt

Salt
is the term we use to describe the taste of sodium ions. The most common form of salt is sodium chloride, which we add to food while cooking or sprinkle on at the table. Many foods naturally contain sodium, such as seafood and celery. Salt is critical to life, but we cannot store excess sodium in our bodies, so we are programmed to seek it out in the form of food. In modern times, getting just enough sodium in our diets—without excess—has proved to be a bigger challenge than getting too little. Regardless of how much sodium we consume, our craving for salt is natural—and critical to survival.

Umami

Umami is the most difficult taste to explain because the term is not commonly used outside the world of food or outside Japan, where the term originated. Umami is the taste of glutamates—amino acids that are present in some foods such as beef and mushrooms. The best-known umami-rich compound is glutamic acid—or glutamate—which occurs naturally in some foods such as mushrooms and seaweed. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is the salt of glutamic acid and this form is often added to foods as a seasoning. We sometimes describe umami as tasting
meaty, savory, satisfying, or full. Think of the difference between raw ground beef—which has little umami—and a well-cooked hamburger, which has lots. Other savory foods that are high in umami are cooked tomatoes and the king of umami: aged Parmesan cheese.

How do we actually taste these five Basic Tastes? One possibility is that different regions of the tongue process different tastes—as on this map, some version of which you almost certainly saw in elementary school.

The taste map of the tongue. Be careful how you interpret this!

The map shows the geography of the tongue and which area corresponds to which taste. People love this anatomical map because it makes some sense of the multitude of things you taste simultaneously in your mouth when you eat. There’s a major problem with it, though: it’s completely misleading. It seems to say that you can taste only one of the five Basic Tastes on one area of your tongue.
This is not true.
You can taste all five of the Basic Tastes on all parts of your tongue. Certain tastes will be more intense in certain areas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t detect these tastes elsewhere. Sour is really intense on the side of the tongue but you can taste sour everywhere. Prove it to yourself now by doing the Sour All Over Tasting exercise (at the end of the chapter): dip a cotton swab into distilled vinegar, a really tart liquid. Dab the swab around your mouth without swallowing. You should taste sour all over your mouth, not just on the sides of your tongue. That is, unless you have bald spots on your tongue or other damage to your taste nerves (as I do).

Once you put food in your mouth, there are four dimensions of the sense of taste, according to Paul Breslin of Rutgers University and the Monell Chemical Senses Center. He calls the five Basic Tastes
qualities.
I like to think of the five Basic Tastes as the first question (Q) of taste, the What: What is it you’re tasting? Sweet? Sour? Bitter? The taste qualities of a tomato are sweet and sour.