This chart lists some selected products of kilning, baking, roasting, frying and other cooking methods. Just to put it into some kind of context, these flavorful chemicals arise from several fearsomely complex chemical processes involving heat: Maillard browning, caramelization and pyrolysis, which is essentially burning.
Back in 2018, at the very beginning of my work on Your Tasting Brain, I reached out to some experts in various aspects of the chemical senses and the things we use them for. One of them was Mary Svoboda, a director of R&D for a flavor company. Her insights helped me shape the character of the book.
Watch an expert pick up a glass, give it a quick sniff and instantly the complexities of a wine or beer are translated into a few choice words. It looks like simplicity itself, but try to do the same thing as a novice and it’s often an epic struggle. Experts may make it look easy, but it takes a long time to get there. There are many barriers, not the least of which is that tasting is a deeply unnatural act.
About the size of a kidney bean, our olfactory bulb is one of the smaller parts of the human brain, and also one of the more amazing. Its prime function is to process signals from a host of olfactory neurons, then serve their response patterns up to the brain, which recognizes odors based on past experiences.
You know how people are always telling you that something tasty you thought was also good for you may actually not be? Here’s another one: umami. Not the glutamate salt to which we are most sensitive, but some of its synergistic sidekicks.
For the new book, I needed to find something to say about wine that gets to the root of how its flavors are created and change over time. While the stupefying complexities of terroir are undoubtedly central to understanding any one wine, it’s easy easy to get lost in that labyrinthine rabbit-hole, and miss the vineyard by focusing on the vines. Since most people interested in wine likely have boatloads of resources along those lines, I decided to skip it all and focus on a few basic questions I had never seen addressed in my stack of books or in conversations with sommeliers or tasting room staff.
Back in the heyday of American automotive glory, most vehicles were affordable but they rarely lasted very long. For most middle-class families it was normal to buy a new car every two or three years. This meant trading the rust, dragging mufflers and stale design for something shiny and fresh. The sweetly intoxicating odor of vinyl chloride, a component of the soft plastic that covered much of the interior was the primary odor note that I recall, and it was the olfactory touchstone for this rebirth. It was (cough, cough) glorious.
Our trigeminal system consists of multiple coordinated sensory inputs based on more than a dozen receptor types. As I often do to get a grip on a subject, I found it helpful to diagram various parts of it. As the book was getting longer and longer, we decided we could do without the diagram, so I’m presenting it here. It’s a representation of the major touch sensing systems we use for mouthfeel/trigeminal sensations.
If you know even a little about the olfactory system, you get the general idea that at the very beginning of any perceptible smell are numerous events in which odorous molecules bind to receptor proteins. This ultimately results in a neural signal being transmitted into the brain via the olfactory bulb. This was my starting point, too, but I decided it would be interesting to know how all that actually happened.
As someone with a creative bent, I want to make sure I have access to the widest possible range of flavors to work with, just as an artist would want to have a lot of colored paints at hand. Some seasonings have very specialized uses and stay in the cabinet, but others are used so often I keep them on a rack right above the cooktop. Most herbs and spices are best suited either for savory foods or sweet ones. A few, like ginger, have shape-shifting characters that lets them do dual duty. Of these, coriander is the king in my kitchen.