Savoring flavor: a primer
"As soon as an edible body has been put into the mouth, it is seized upon - gases, moisture, and all - without possibility of retreat. Lips stop whatever might try to escape; the teeth bite and break it; saliva drenches it; the tongue mashes and churns it; a breathlike sucking pushes it toward the gullet; the tongue lifts up to make it slide and slip; the sense of smell appreciates it as it passes the nasal channel, and it is pulled down into the stomach to be submitted to sundry baser transformations without, in this whole metamorphosis, a single atom or drop or particle having been missed by the powers of appreciation of the taste sense."
- J. A. Brillat-Savarin, 1825.

by Helen Bauch

The "appreciation of the taste sense" is indeed the savoring of flavoring. The taste sense functions as a gatekeeper for the gustatory experience. Aspects of flavor provide important information about the food being consumed. Your senses can warn you to slam the gate shut and keep you from ingesting harmful foods, but, of more interest to the foodservice industry, they can provide some of the greatest pleasure humans can experience.

Most food professionals are fully aware of the importance of flavor but frequently unaware of the "nuts and bolts" of flavor evaluation. An understanding of the physiology involved and the tools used to conduct a comprehensive objective evaluation of food flavor can be extremely useful to a foodservice operator.

What happens when you eat
Flavor is the sum total of all the sensory experiences you have when food enters the mouth. The total perception is a combination of aroma, taste, feelings, sights, and sounds, involving all our senses.

"An epicure eats with his brain as well as his mouth." - Charles Lamb

When you grind coffee beans, open an oven of baking bread, or unscrew the top of a cinnamon jar, you experience aroma and develop expectations from it. Aroma or smell is the first of the many sensory experiences you have when you eat, providing the most information of all the senses about the food. The mouth can sense only five tastes, whereas the nose can recognize thousands of aromas.

When you begin to smell, the olfactory epithelium, the receptor for smell in the brain, has been called to attention. Depending on the aroma, a message is sent out to other areas in the brain -maybe a danger message if the smell is offensive, such as from a harsh chemical, or, preferably, a pleasure message.

As Malcolm de Chazal in Sens Plastique colorfully described it, "A voracious sense of smell leans forward on its nostrils like a glutton eating with his elbows on the table."

Next time you smell a strong aroma from food, pay close attention to your body; you will see a noticeable physiological response. You are put on sensory alert. The brain is saying, "Get ready; something's coming." Salivation begins; you perk up and pay attention to your mouth. The aroma experience continues as food enters your mouth, because, as you chew, aroma is forced up through the back of the throat to the olfactory area.

Then we taste. In its purest definition, taste is a very narrow experience and includes only the four basic tastes - sweet, sour, salty, bitter - and a fifth, called umami. Known in Japan for years and still controversial, umami, a response to the glutamate ion, is best described as tasty or savory, the "yummy" taste. The four basic tastes are physiologically well documented and are detected by our taste buds, but umami is still being figured out. Studies at Monell Institute suggest that several receptors for glutamate may be involved in the taste of umami and may be present in taste receptor cells.

Taste buds are sensitive receptors scattered about in the mouth and throat, soft palate and particularly on the tongue. Specialized for each basic taste, they are situated on visible structures known as papillae, the little bumps that are quite visible on your tongue.

The basic tastes are the entirety of what is sensed by the mouth. All other experiences during the evaluation of flavor are not taste, but are related to odor, the feeling factors - texture, pressure, pain, and temperature - and, finally, sight and sound.

Feeling factors can be in the nose, mouth, or throat. Common feelings in the nose include the nose-clearing sensation you get from wasabi. When you don't experience this sensation, you know the pungency associated with freshness is missing. Tingling and pungency are clues that ground black pepper, for instance, is fresh.

Common mouth-feelings are the astringency or puckering that comes with strong tea or cranberry juice and the mouth-drying you experience when eating green bananas. Pay attention to feelings or their absence, as they are significant when critically evaluating foods and often provide important clues about food quality.

Working along with the taste buds and sense of smell is the trigeminal system, branches of a nerve running between the brain, nose, and mouth. This system detects irritants such as those found in hot chilies, mint, and carbonation. The sense of touch is employed to perceive such sensations as the smoothness of a créme brûlee or the crispness of lettuce.

We also eat with our eyes, and the appearance of food greatly enhances or detracts from the sensory experience. This phenomenon has been backed up by scientific studies that prove the relationship between, for one, the intensity of color and perception of flavor. Cakes made with darker yellow egg yolks were evaluated as being moister than those prepared with lighter yolk color, even though the formulas were identical. Fruit-flavored beverages often give more flavor cues from color than can possibly be derived from the actual beverage flavor; i.e. we know it's grape because it's purple. If the colors are switched, many people cannot correctly identify the flavor.

A final consideration in foodservice is the utensils that are used with food. They can significantly influence how flavor is perceived. My mother would not drink tea from a thick cup -she claimed it didn't look good, didn't feel good, and so didn't taste good. And she was right. With the thick cup, she couldn't slurp as she was accustomed to doing, and thus missed the aromatics. Could you truly appreciate a glass of fine wine served in a plastic glass?

Taste, aroma, textures, mouth-feel, appearance, and the physical presentation of food all contribute to the total final sensory experience of flavor, and all must be considered when evaluating foods.

What is good flavor?
In the food world, with few exceptions, we are not able to quantify and categorize flavor by a scientific or even a quasi-scientific gauge. We can measure some attributes objectively: for example, analytical methods for salt content and the use of the Scoville scale to quantify the heat level of chili peppers. Food professionals, however, generally agree on a "pattern of good flavor," which is demonstrated by brand leaders whose products have been successful over the long term. They all share certain characteristics.

First there should be immediate recognition of what the product is supposed to be. Fernand Point of La Pyramide restaurant in Vienne, France, one of the most influential chefs of our times, said simply, "Foods should taste and look like what they are."

Next, there should be a rapid development of full-bodied flavor - a kind of fanning out of the flavor. The whole effect should be pleasing and blended, with nothing in particular standing out. Finally, there should be no off-notes. You should encounter nothing unexpected, and there should be no aftertastes unless appropriate. This is the minimal expectation of good flavor. Beyond this basic pattern, the possibilities are endless.

Individual tastes vary widely, and a key word in the pattern of good flavor is that it be pleasing. Flavors are pleasing or not based on physiological, psychological and cultural variables. There is a strong cultural determinant to what is a pleasing flavor to one person and not to another.

This question of whether or not a flavor is pleasing to another taster is difficult to judge; usually you evaluate flavors within a limited range of personal eating experience (for example, foods from the menu of your restaurant), and therefore, based on experience, you can be comfortable making such a judgment. When the question of "pleasing flavor" with a wide variety of consumers arises, that is the time to consider professional sensory evaluation.

How to evaluate flavor
When you taste critically, your objective should be to collect as much information as possible about the food or beverage. Evaluate food in an unsentimental way, free from influence of brand names and advertising.

"Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing." - James Thurber

This is known as a blind tasting, and the technique should be employed in every situation possible. Control as many variables as you can. Code samples for identification. Evaluate in a quiet environment where you can concentrate without interruption.

The first step in evaluating flavor is to smell by taking three short sniffs. That's all you need to get an impression; otherwise you will experience what is known as olfactory adaptation. Most people are familiar with the phenomenon from entering a freshly painted room - the first impression is overwhelming, but soon you no longer notice it. The same thing occurs with smelling a food sample.

Once you've taken your three short sniffs, rest the nose by moving away from the sample and breathing fresh air. Then return to the sample. Keep track of what you smell in the order in which you smell it.

Next, taste the sample. Get a big enough mouthful to cover the entire surface of your tongue as well as other areas of the mouth. If the sample is liquid, slurp it so that aromatics can travel up the nasal passages. Evaluate foods at the temperature at which they are normally served. Write down what you taste. Use water between samples to cleanse the palate and prepare for the next sample.

Once you've decided from your small evaluation taste that the flavor is satisfactory, try to eat an entire portion of a food. Sometimes a flavor can be very pleasing in small amounts but overwhelming and out of balance in a full portion. This is often overlooked in foodservice.

Look for aftertastes, inappropriate notes, and after-textures. One minute after swallowing, check what you taste. There should be a pleasant tailing-off of flavor and no lingering, undesirable flavors or mouth-feelings.

Using these techniques, if you evaluate certain foods that are important to your business, you will soon develop a specific vocabulary and an intensity scale of your own relative to each particular food. For example, some of the words used in evaluations of vanilla are leather, beanie, resinous, pruney, fruity, and woody. Olive oil evaluators use hundreds of terms to describe various attributes of the oil: flowery, bitter, peppery, nutty, and biting, to name a few.

Critical flavor evaluation pays off
Flavor plays an ever-increasing role in contemporary foodservice. Fortunes have been made by operators who understand and utilize the power of flavor. Simple moves such as the addition of "new" flavors to old favorites have developed new profits. Menu items such as garlic-mashed potatoes and portabello mushroom meatloaf attract new customers and drive new business.

Controlled, critical flavor evaluation can play an important role in foodservice product development through discovery of exciting new flavor experiences and the protection of existing food quality and high standards