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chemicals that results from browning action when you roast meat, bake pastries or toast bread.)
Another enhancer, sodium dioctylsulphonate gives the perception of freshness in heat-
treated milk to compensate for the flat, cooked taste. The enhancer N,N'-di-o-tolylethylene diamine
produces the sensation of a buttery flavor in margarine.
Other ways flavors change
Some natural flavors can mask other flavors. For instance, sugar masks fruit flavors. A salty
flavor masks the bitter taste. Masking flavors can be physically, too. Gums or starches used to
thicken a food slow down the movement of flavor chemicals in your mouth, so the taste reaches
your taste buds more slowly and with less intensity. Hot foods taste spicier and cold foods blander
simply because the volatile components escape faster or slower, respectively, to reach your taste
buds in hot foods.
TASTINGS Can you recognize flavors?
Some people have an amazing capacity to recognize the components of any food
they eat. These rare people can recreate the component of a meal they have just
eaten in a restaurant with reasonable accuracy. Others have no idea what they are
chewing, familiar though the flavor may be.
A chemical action can also mask flavors. For instance, starch and protein mask some of the
flavor components of meat. The chemical binding of these flavors makes them less likely to reach
the taste buds of the person eating that food—that tones down the true, full flavor.
How fast a flavor reaches the taste buds on our tongues determines the flavor intensity of
what we eat. In fatty foods the taste comes to us gradually and remains in our mouths longer
because fats act as insulators. Low-fat foods don't have this insulating effect. The taster receives an
unaccustomed quick but short-term flavor jolt. This has become a real problem for researchers as
consumers demand more and more low-fat foods with good flavor. Scientists are searching for
substances they can add to low-fat foods that mimic the insulating effect of fats, such as natural
gums, so the flavor of food travels more slowly to the taste buds and stays in the mouth longer.
Is salt a flavoring agent?
Strictly speaking, salt is not a flavoring agent, yet it certainly enhances or sharpens the
flavor of any food (even coffee). It is the only flavoring that is essential to our health.
Salt is a simple chemical that comes in a variety of crystal forms. Cookbooks sometimes
recommend some salts as stronger or sharper than others. Many recipes you read today specify sea
salt, for example. Is there really a difference between salt and salt? No. Salt, no matter where it
comes from or what shape it is in, is simply a chemical with a strict and unvarying chemical
formula, NaCl or sodium chloride. It is true that some types of table salt include minute amounts of
other salts or minerals. But 99.9 percent of it is still just plain salt. The sea salt fad originates from
the idea of being “natural”. But salt they mine in a salt mine comes from the same source, the sea
and it is no less or more natural.
In the table below you notice that some salt comes in different shapes and sizes. Our taste
buds perceive the saltiness differently if the size and shape of the salt crystals differ. But for
cooking, once the cook adds the salt to the food and dissolves it, the original shape and size of the
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