When I am making food, whether I’m baking a cake or finding flavor combinations for focaccia, flavor is almost always the number one priority in my head. But even though we all know how important flavor is, baking advice is often far more focused on techniques to make your food more airy or moist, instead of just making sure it tastes good. While this always was odd to me it makes a lot more sense when you consider just how complicated flavor can be. Everyone likes airier bread and lighter cakes, but how sweet that cake should be or what flavors it should have can be a lot more controversial.
Flavor can often be a matter of opinion, although there are certain flavors and combinations that are widely considered “good”. But why is this? If there are flavors that are enjoyable to most people, is there a way to use science to find them? To find that out, I first set out to understand how taste works.
How Does Taste Work?
When we think about taste we generally think about food hitting taste buds on your tongue that send signals to your brain. For a long time, people believed that the tongue was separated into distinct sections that each could sense a different basic taste. This idea gave rise to a “tongue map”, where sections were drawn onto a tongue to illustrate the concept.
“Different Taste buds on tongue, by Bot1036 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0”
However, we now know this depiction was completely false: we actually have taste buds all over our tongue (and even in our throat) that can sense multiple tastes at once. While taste buds are still considered the main tasting organ, they are not the entire story when it comes to taste.
Taste truly begins before the food even enters the mouth, beginning with the smell. You may have heard that smell contributes to up to 80% of what we consider flavor, and this is because much of the complexity of flavor that we get from a food doesn’t simply come from a mixture of basic tastes, but aromatic compounds that travel to protein receptors in our noses that send signals to the brain. Through this process our brains are able to distinguish and appreciate flavors far better than would be possible through taste alone.
Once the food actually reaches the mouth it doesn’t immediately hit the taste buds, but a larger part of the tongue called the taste papillae. Taste papillae are the bumps you can see on your tongue that contain groups of taste buds and work to sense temperature. A lot of the reasoning behind the taste map came from papillae because mouths contain different types of papillae across the tongue that contain different amounts of taste buds. But what it gets wrong is that it does not understand how the taste bud itself works. Taste buds do not each sense a singular taste because taste buds don’t sense the flavor itself they simply contain cells called taste receptor cells. Taste buds generally contain around 50-150 taste receptors and these receptors, as opposed to the entire taste bud, are each specialized for different tastes and compounds, allowing each taste bud to recognize multiple or all of the different tastes.
“Taste bud, by NEUROtiker licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0”
While this new understanding of taste is important to understanding flavor better and why it is so complicated, it doesn’t explain why flavor is so controversial. For that I had to look at the genes that control the perception of taste, as well as the taste buds themselves, a little closer.
The average person has ~2,000-10,000 taste buds, a wide range that is mainly genetic and has a strong impact on how intensely we perceive flavors. Additionally, as we age we lose taste buds, which means children to have different and often stronger perceptions of taste. These differences, as well as a variety of other physical factors are a large reason why taste can vary so much between people.
That said, there are some shared qualities that we all tend to have, mainly relating to the 5 basic tastes. Let’s dig into that!
Sweetness
Sweetness is one of the most universally liked tastes. Like all tastes, this is largely due to a survival mechanism: sweet tastes generally signal large amounts of readily available glucose, an easily digestible simple carbohydrate that was essential for survival for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. This makes sweetness an essential flavor that has a use in far more foods than we would commonly think.
For example, the use of sugar in savory foods like Korean fried chicken or hot honey is a very common flavor combination that works because it combines an already delicious food with meaty and savory flavors that our brains are programmed to like with sugar in a way the elevates the experience and makes the meal far more rewarding to the brain.
Saltiness
Saltiness is a more complicated taste in many ways than sugar; while at the surface level it is simply a mechanism to ensure we consume the electrolyte sodium, salt does far more than provide a pleasurable taste in cooking. In most dishes, salt serves as a flavor enhancer, balancing out the flavor profile of dishes and breaking down compounds in food that release more aromas: the result is a stronger overall flavor, whether sweet or savory. This means that salt is essential to almost all food and should be added regardless of the other flavors, simply adjusting the amount as appropriate for the dish.
For example when cooking a piece of meat, salt is added not simply to add a salty flavor, but to elevate the meatiness and the aromatic flavors within the meat that are extracted by the salt.
Sourness
While you might guess that like sweetness and saltiness, sourness as a taste is simply yet another mechanism to encourage the consumption of an essential nutrient, this is only partially true. While in humans it is true that sour tastes are an indication of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, many animals that naturally produce vitamin C also taste sourness leading scientists to believe its use goes beyond vitamin C.
Dehydro-L-Ascorbic acid Structural Formula V – Open Source
One main theory is that sourness served as an indicator to whether rotting fruit was safe or not: acidic fruits are usually safe, causing sour flavors to have a positive association in most animals.
Acidity is not as rewarding to the brain as sweetness, similar to salt, but it can usually work to further extract flavors from a dish through a contrast and by cutting through fattier flavors. Its stronger flavor lets it to be used more sparingly than salt, but acidity can still be key in balancing flavor combinations and preventing them from becoming overwhelming.
Umami
Unlike the last three flavors, you may or may not have heard of umami, but you most definitely have tasted it. Umami is a Japanese word that directly translates to delicious and generally refers to a savory or meaty taste. Similarly to sugar it is quite universally liked as it is generally an indicator of protein. However, unlike sweetness, umami as a flavor does not come from protein itself, but instead a compound called glutamate. Glutamate is a naturally occurring compound found in most meat as well as mushrooms, parmesan, and many other foods and seasonings, most notably monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
While umami has only been considered a basic taste more recently, it has been a necessary survival mechanism for most of humanity. This makes it another incredibly important flavor that can be key in creating new flavor pairings and elevating already flavorful dishes. This can be seen in countless examples such as pasta in which parmesan is often added, adding to the complexity of the dish as well as adding a large boost to the glutamate content of the dish, elevating the dish without even needing to add a completely new flavor.
Bitterness
Unlike other flavors, bitterness tends to be far more polarizing, as bitter flavors often have a negative association. This is largely because bitterness was a sign of toxicity, meaning it would stop humans from poisoning themselves. However, the far more interesting idea about bitterness is why so many people like it.
While it supposedly signals toxicity many people eat bitter foods like chocolate and coffee every day. Much of this is attributed to the additional benefits of caffeine and sugar present in both but, this is not so much the case with all foods such as bitter melon and grapefruit, foods that are commonly eaten in many cultures without the positive benefits of coffee and chocolate. Theories on why these foods are eaten and why they are so polarizing come down to two main things.
Firstly, it is speculated that many non-toxic bitter foods had medicinal effects making them important for survival for much of history, and possibly explaining why they were eaten in many cultures despite the usual toxicity of many bitter foods. Secondly, humans have about 25 different bitter tasting genes, each one responding to a different group of chemicals. For this reason, many people either without certain genes or with a variation of a gene are unable to taste certain bitter compounds making certain foods taste different to some than to others. This makes bitterness the most complex flavor to try and incorporate into cooking as often we strive to remove bitter flavors, not add them,
It may be difficult to make bitterness a core flavor of many dishes, but it can be incredibly useful as an undertone, providing balance and complexity to dishes. This is most commonly seen when dishes used charred vegetables to add a subtle bitter undertone to food without overpowering the other flavors present and making the dish unpleasant.
Trying New Flavors
I’ve always been a bit of a picky eater, but I never really knew why. Was it genetic or was it just something wrong with me? As I grew up I did learn to become a bit less picky but I still am more picky than other people in my family. That led me back to the idea of subjectivity in flavor. Why are some people picky eaters, and how do some people grow out of being picky?
Well, it turns out that aside from unique medical circumstances, we are all generally picky as babies because we are only really strongly hard wired to like sweetness and hate bitterness. Aside from this our preferences are based mostly on our experiences. Generally, we like familiarity and dislike new tastes, especially at a young age, and this can often be strengthened by a poor first experience with a food or a great first experience, with both strongly affecting our perception of the food the next time we try it. This can certainly differ person to person, but generally the way that we begin to like more foods and become less “picky” is simply by trying more foods.
When we try a new food for the first time and don’t like it, this dislike generally goes down after repeated exposure. This means that a large part of why we dislike foods is because we decide we dislike them and from then on avoid them. By exposing ourselves to foods we dislike over time we not only grow to like that food more, but similar foods as well. This is one of the reasons why we grow out of picky eating, each time we try a new food and learn to like it, we often decrease the pool of foods that we will dislike upon trying them.
Finding the Right Flavors
Now with an understanding of taste and why people like what they like, we can start to use this information to improve our food.
The most important thing to understand about flavor is that the 2 most universally loved flavors are umami and sweetness, and from a basic perspective this makes sense and makes flavor combinations simpler as one or the other will generally always be present in a dish depending on if it is sweet or savory. What is far more important is learning how a dish can be elevated when both are present, as this is often the basis of some of the most beloved flavor combinations. The proof of this can be seen across cuisines, such as glazed meat, sweet sauces on fried chicken, and many more places, but beyond this sweetness can also be essential in balancing savory dishes often by mellowing out bitter or harsh notes.
However, while these two flavors are essential, others cannot be ignored in flavor pairings. While adding salt to a dish might seem obvious, the amount needed is often far more than might seem necessary as the goal of adding salt is not to simply add a pleasant salty flavor, but to bring out more flavors and aromas already present in the dish, meaning this applies not only to savory dishes but sweet ones too.
But when salt alone is not enough often times before reaching to continue adding more, consider adding acid in the form of vinegar or citrus juice. While a sour flavor in your dish may seem unpleasant, this is not the goal of the acid, instead the sourness will serve as a mild contrast to the other flavors, further intensifying them without adding a prominent sour flavor.
While the flavor can always be pushed even further with things like MSG and fat, often a far more important part of flavor comes from balancing and fine tuning.
Balancing Flavors
You may have built up all the right flavors in your dish and used various methods to intensify it, but your dish can still be ruined if the balance is off. Too much salt or too much bitterness can completely change a dish from what you wanted it to be, so often, we need to have ways to tweak the dish after it is unbalanced.
The easiest way to do this is to taste and notice which flavors are too prominent and find its “opposite” to counteract it. For example, if a dish is too salty, often a pinch of sugar can help balance out the flavors, similarly if a dish is too rich and savory, a squeeze of lemon or the addition of a sour flavor can often counteract this imbalance. In reality the way to create a perfect flavor combination is to maximize the flavors we love, sugar and umami, by using acid and saltiness, without overwhelming the senses with too much of a good thing, using bitterness and acid to balance. Beyond that all we can really do is try new things and see what works.
