Our minds work hard to parse every sensory impulse into psychological qualities that help us respond appropriately. Among the most important is determining the value of the sensation and the object it represents.
Whether individual tastes travel exclusively along dedicated pathways or are encoded to allow multiple taste signals to travel through shared nerves is an active argument within science that is still unresolved. This is not just an academic question. The nature of these connections determine the kinds of sensations we perceive.
Kokumi is another effect, like umami, that we have experienced for millennia, but until recently had no understanding of what it truly was. You think about traditional processes that a fine chef might use to deliver a full-bodied desirable food – making stocks, long simmering, even aging of cheeses and meats.
Recently reviewing some of the bits and pieces of text we cut because they were just a bit too detailed for what we were trying to do, I marveled again about all this neurological clockwork. There’s an awful lot more going on, but I think the capabilities, concerns and mechanisms of these brain regions I have plenty to say in the upcoming book, but
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.