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pleasing to you, you readily accept a good flavor. If the texture is unexpected for that food, or
simply not pleasant to you, you may reject the flavor, even though it is otherwise a pleasing flavor.
Let’s suppose someone soaked and mashed the same popcorn in the previous example like mashed
potatoes. Its flavor (and possibly its smell) did not change, but as soon as you bite into its
unexpected texture, you taste buds reject it as inedible, and your brain instructs you to spit it out in
disgust at once.
The temperature of a food affects our perception of flavors, too. Empty a can of beer in a
saucepan and heat it. Serve it in coffee mug for a new taste sensation. Yuck! Or heat a crisp salad in
the microwave just until it is nice and hot and serve it to your guests as a first course. Its taste is
strange and unappealing, yet the flavorings altered very little in either the beer or the salad.
Even color and sound affect our sense of taste. Put green food color in milk and see if you
can still drink it. In the Caribbean punishment dinner for misbehaved children is warm milk that
their mothers mix with puréed green vegetables. What a horrid experience! The sound of crunching
on food must be predictable, too. If the expected crisp-crunchy sound is gone from the potato chips
because you steamed them before serving, they also taste entirely different to you even if the flavors
remain the same.
Finally, our physical and mental states affect our food tasting immensely. Just think about
what dinner tastes like after an awful day at work, followed by a bad scene with your son. You may
feel hunger pangs, but even a great meal doesn't taste right. This is also true when you have a
physical problem. But the opposite is true when you are experiencing a spiritual or mental high.
Remember the hot dog at a good ball game? It tastes much better than that same flavorless, greasy
hot dog does at the boring company picnic or at home. Almost any meal taste great following a
good hike or other enjoyable physical activity, or even after an uplifting mental or spiritual
experience.
Basic flavors: four plus one
Since 1864, when scientists first presented the concept of how we taste things, they believed
we perceive four flavors: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. A different set of taste buds has the
responsibility for each of these basic flavors. The four sets of taste buds effect each other and work
together, not unlike the four voices in a barbershop quartet, and they send a single message to the
brain about the overall flavor of the food that you happen to be nibbling on. For instance, in the
overall taste, a sweet flavor reduces the sensation of bitter and sour tastes, a sour flavor reduces any
bitter taste and increases the perception of saltiness, and salty foods reduce the sense of sourness and
increase the sense of sweetness.
When you blend foods with several flavors, the result may be a pleasant or unpleasant taste
sensation. When it is a pleasant blend we call the food mix having a pleasing taste balance. Some
spices form a favorable taste balance, others clash with each other. For instance, two spices together
in both Indian and Mexican cuisines are cumin and coriander seeds. They form a good taste balance
and they use these two together often. When you blend together two or more spices, the blend mutes
and softens the individual spice flavors. A good example is curry powder in which you grind a
number of strong-flavored spices together, yet curry powder is not a forcefully aggressive spice
blend.
Another curious character of tastes happens when they follow each other instead of in blend.
In some Chinese cuisines the cook offers a barely-sweetened dish after a spicy course to cleanse the
palate. The slightly-sweetened dish tastes more sweet to the eaters after the spice-laden dish.
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