Taste is on the tip of your tongue but flavour is made in your brain, writes Elaine Reeves

Tastebuds occur only on our tongues, but eating would be a dull business if our senses of smell, sight, sound and touch did not also come into play, writes ELAINE REEVES

Professor Ole Mouritsen during his talk at the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Hobart. Picture: BRAD HARRIS

THERE’S more to taste than meets the tongue. Tastebuds occur only on our tongues, but eating would be a dull business indeed if our senses of smell, sight, sound and touch did not also come into play.

There are really only five tastes we can discern with our tongues — sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami — but we are able to distinguish some 10,000 different smells. Bee Wilson says in her book First Bite (Fourth Estate) that olfactory receptors in our noses make up the largest single family in the human genome — about 5 per cent.

“The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight and touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it,” she writes.

In February, Ole Mouritsen, professor of gastrophysics at the University of Copenhagen, was brought to Hobart by the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture and Australian Colloids and Interfaces Society to deliver a talk on the science of taste.

One of the “taste boxes” given to participants at Ole Mouritsen’s talk. Picture: BRAD HARRIS

The audience at the Grand Chancellor Hotel received boxes of small taste experiments. Eat the jelly bean while pinching your nose he instructed — this replicates the experience of having a heavy cold. The jelly bean tastes only sweet. Unpinch your nose, and fruit, cinnamon or aniseed flavours might arrive — not tastes but aromas.

It’s a truism that we taste first with our eyes. If something looks revolting it’s unlikely we will ever find out how it tastes. A photographer will take a bowl of peaches as a subject over a stew any day. Tasting yellow beetroot messes with our heads.

I once had a dining in the dark experience, which showed just how difficult it is to identify a flavour when you are robbed of visual clues. Among the taste experiments Ole gave his audience, was a green cube of jell. What did it taste of he asked. Broccoli, radish, asparagus and cauliflower were among the answers called out.

I thought it tasted like cabbage; and I was right. Only 5 per cent of people recognised the taste without “seeing” what they were eating, said Ole. The crunch of an apple or the crackle of crisps enhances the “taste” experience.

“However, if the food does not live up to our expectations and we do not like it, it turns out that in most cases it has little to do with taste or smell, but rather how the food feels in our mouth. Unwanted texture of food is the most frequent reason for us to reject it,” writes Ole.

Also, the right texture is often linked to the freshness and correct preparation of food, he says. Potato crisps that have been left out of the packet for a couple of days still taste the same as fresh ones, but their snap is missing and we don’t experience them in the same way.

Beer without bubbles, mealy apples, a dinner pureed instead of being in its constituent parts — mouthfeel makes a difference. If food is soggy when it should be crisp, cold when it should be hot, it disappoints.

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Ole Mouritsen, centre, in conversation after his talk at the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Hobart. Picture: BRAD HARRIS

Ole Mouritsen has written the book on it: Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste (Columbia University Press). More than 300 pages of easily digestible taste science.

He says mouthfeel is probably the most overlooked component of flavour in the Western world, but in Asia, particularly Japan, it is much more regarded. There is a Japanese treatment of food called tsukemono or “the art of culinary crunch”. Vegetables or fruit are dried, then sliced then put in brine.

“Once dried, the vegetables look like weak, miserable versions of themselves,” he says. But the sample piece of cucumber we had was delicious and made enough racket in the head to exclude hearing anything else.

Other non-tastes that contribute to flavour include the reactions caused in the skin and mucous membrane to such foods as chilli, horseradish or mustard. We say they are hot, but the temperature in the mouth is not changed a jot.

Tannins in new red wine or over-stewed tea cause astringency, which is also a mouthfeel not a taste.

Taste may be on the tip of your tongue, but flavour is made in the brain, says the gastrophysicist. “The overall sensory impression of taste, smell and mouthfeel is integrated in the brain and give us flavour.”

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