Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (27 page)

To critically analyze a food, start by asking yourself if all five of the Basic Tastes
should
be present. For some foods, the answer is yes. For others, the answer is no. And sometimes it’s not so cut-and-dried.

Let’s move from egg salad (please) to something else. Like chocolate. Imagine yourself trying to make the decision between two different milk chocolate bars. You sample one, then the other. How do you decide which one to eat? Here’s how I would proceed.

The first sense you use in the evaluation of food is your sight. Milk chocolate bars might have a range of brown colors and a range of shine or gloss, and if the chocolate was not tempered or stored properly, there might be a slight bloom on it. Chocolate bloom is usually harmless, even though the resulting white coating looks a bit like mold and is considered a negative appearance quality.

Next we move to the second sense, taste. Should all five Basic Tastes be present? Chocolate should be sweet. But how sweet? Should it be sour? Bitter? What about salt? And umami?

Some premium varietal chocolate (made from a single type of cocoa bean) has a slightly fruity note, which may come across as sour. Some milk chocolates have a sour-milk note that gives them a certain distinctive character. But for something sour, you’d probably choose a Jolly Rancher or Life Saver. If you wanted something chocolaty
and
sour, you might reach for Raisinets, in which sour is entirely appropriate. Regular chocolate has a very low level of sourness. But since sour is evident in chocolate, it goes on the attribute list.

Bitter may not be a taste you want in many foods, but in chocolate a touch of bitterness can lend depth and complexity, which chocolate that lacks bitterness doesn’t have. Bitterness is inherent in cocoa beans, so it’s likely to be there anyway. We’re just talking about the sensory aspects, not which type of chocolate (milk or dark, bitter or not) is better. We’ll get to preference later. It’s probably
good to have a little bit of bitterness in a chocolate bar. How much? Just about the right amount. Bitter, then, goes on the list of attributes.

Salt is another flavor you wouldn’t usually associate with chocolate, but salt gives chocolate a counterpoint. Think of the perfectly balanced five-pointed Taste Star. If our chocolate is sweet (the first point) and slightly bitter (the second point), adding salt will give it another point (the third point). Each counterpoint adds contrast. And if they’re at a level that’s
just about right
, they add balance.

Back to salt. Since our chocolate tasting is for plain milk chocolate bars, not sea salt chocolates or salted caramels, let’s agree that salt may be present but it probably shouldn’t be obvious—that would mean it was out of balance. Salt goes on the list.

Umami is another taste that usually isn’t present in chocolate. I have tasted chocolate with umami, which changes the taste dramatically, but it has to be at a very low level or it sticks out like a sore thumb. Trendy chocolate bars with bacon in them have the Basic Taste of umami as well as salt and the aroma of smoke, for an interesting twist. But for this exercise, we’ll leave umami off the list of attributes for milk chocolate.

Now we move from taste to texture, a key component of chocolate bars. This requires a completely different sense. Now you’re going to have to put taste aside and rely on your sense of touch. In the food industry, we refer to the texture of foods in your mouth as
mouthfeel
—how a food feels in your mouth. Should the mouthfeel of a perfect chocolate bar be gritty, grainy, smooth, crispy, crunchy, creamy, thin, fatty, or chewy? Should the chocolate linger on your tongue or disappear quickly? Since you’re evaluating a regular milk chocolate bar, without nuts or other ingredients, let’s say that it should be smooth and creamy with a fatty texture that lingers on your tongue but doesn’t feel waxy. All of these attributes go on the list.

Next sense: smell. Now you’re ready to consider which aromas you expect in a chocolate bar, the same way you consider which of the five Basic Tastes should be present. Try inhaling its aroma in a long, sustained slow breath, which is more effective at detecting odors than short repetitive sniffs. The chocolate may have a subtle aroma when you nose-smell it, but probably not much, because the volatile aromas in chocolate aren’t released until the chocolate is heated or melted—both of which happen in your mouth. Once you’ve gleaned what you can from nose-smelling, you’ll put the chocolate bar in your mouth to mouth-smell it, which is when the aromas come alive.

Coming up with the terms you use to describe the two chocolate bars is
called
developing a lexicon.
At Tragon, the taste-profiling firm, its trained consumer panelists choose the terms in the lexicon. To create these terms, they taste a broad, heterogeneous range of the food being worked on: cookies, wines, chocolates. For this chocolate tasting exercise, it would mean assembling lots of milk chocolate bars—from cheap to expensive—to make sure you’ve covered all the aroma ground of chocolate.

In order to train its panelists to detect a certain attribute, Tragon might give the panelists a reference food—an example of something that has the prototypical flavor they’re trying to identify. Tragon and other sensory testing firms are trying to use humans as tasting instruments; in order to measure something with an instrument, you first have to calibrate it. By tasting or smelling a reference, panelists are able to calibrate themselves on what that characteristic refers to. In order for a panel of tasters to rate the level of rancidity in a food, for example, they all need to agree on what rancidity is. The best way to do this is to smell something rancid, agree it’s rancid, and pass it around the room until everyone is calibrated on what rancidity smells like. Then, move on to the next reference.

In our chocolate tasting, the reference for vanilla might be a sniff of a vanilla bean or a sniff from a bottle of vanilla extract. The reference for the attribute “nutty” might be a selection of roasted mixed nuts. Of course, you’ll want references for the Basic Tastes, too. Table salt is usually the reference for salt, and sugar the reference for sweet. Citric acid makes a great reference for sour, but if you don’t work in a food lab that stocks it, you can use ascorbic acid, the technical term for vitamin C. You can buy vitamin C capsules (not tablets) from a health store and open them to taste the powdered contents—a pure reference for sour. Usually quinine, the bittering agent in tonic water, is used as a bitter reference,
¹³
but again, it’s not easy to find. I like using powdered caffeine, which you can make by pulverizing over-the-counter pills such as NoDoz, and dissolving it in hot water. But be careful. Even a tiny taste of caffeinated water is very bitter and more than a tiny bit will keep you up at night. A standard reference for umami is monosodium glutamate, which you can buy at the grocery store, sold as the seasoning brand Acćent.

In a typical milk chocolate, the aromas would include milk, cocoa, and roasted smells, since chocolate (cocoa) beans are roasted. But there may be some
other characteristic flavors such as cooked and caramelized milk, sour milk, coffee, smoke, leather, fruit, nuttiness, or earth. The reference samples for these would include caramel, coffee, liquid smoke, real leather—you get the point.

Lexicon and References for Milk Chocolate

Excerpted from J. Kennedy and H. Heymann,
Projected Mapping and Descriptive Analysis of Milk and Dark Chocolates.

Last, you’ll want to consider the sound of chocolate. If the bar snaps loud and hard, it likely has been tempered, or melted, properly. When chocolate is tempered poorly, the snap sound is much less pronounced.

Now that you’ve considered the basic tastes, aromas, visuals, sound, and texture, you can start to make judgments about the two chocolates. It’s likely that one of them is creamier, one is more bitter, one is milkier, and one is smoother. In making these critical judgments, you are conducting a sensory evaluation.

After you’ve evaluated each individual attribute, you can move on to asking which chocolate you prefer. This exercise should be easy for you, but the interesting thing to ask is
why
you chose the one you did. Do you gravitate toward more bitter or sweet foods? Do you like very creamy (fatty) foods because of the mouthfeel on your tongue? To really figure these things out, complete the Sensory Evaluation of Milk Chocolate Bars exercise at the end of this chapter. Yes, it will be rough, but someone’s gotta do it.

The type of sensory analysis that’s done at Tragon and other sensory testing companies is very different from the type of taste testing we do at Mattson.
Tragon trains human panelists to approach food in an unnatural way, by design. It wants consumers to calibrate their sensory experiences with reference foods and other tasters, who in essence function as analytical machines. The companies don’t use actual machines. Humans will taste something for free in many cases (chocolate, for example) and for very little money in other cases (egg salad, for example, although I’d charge more than most). The thirty-to seventy-five-dollar cost of hiring a consumer to taste samples is much less expensive than putting the same number of samples through a machine such as a gas chromatograph. The results are also more useful, as humans can detect which compounds other humans will also like or dislike. Machines, on the other hand, may be able to detect more compounds in a sample, but those compounds may not necessarily be the ones that people care about. Lastly, humans are mobile, and you can find them just about anywhere, which isn’t true for expensive analytical machines.

At Mattson we test food on humans, too, in the course of improving prototypes during development. First we ask about the sensory characteristics, then we ask how much tasters like the food. Most importantly we ask them if they would buy it. Because you can have just-about-right levels of everything in a dung-fire-grilled squirrel steak, but if a consumer isn’t going to buy it, the testing is moot.

It’s worth noting here that trying to calibrate perceptions of taste is frustrating, because any two (or two hundred and two) people who taste a single food will experience it in different ways. Every human being lives in his own sensory world and about one-quarter of the population is made up of Hyper-Tasters, who may experience a food as being three times as intense as Tolerant Tasters do. The human range of olfactory perception varies tremendously, especially as we age.

Companies like Mattson and Tragon test food with people who actually purchase the product, usually with rabid fans of the food they’re developing or testing. Tragon puts consumers through a battery of tests to prove their sensory skills. In other words, if you are a Coca-Cola drinker and Tragon is testing soft drinks, it will give you taste tests to make sure you can tell the difference between Cola Sample A and Cola Sample B. After a round of testing,
says founder Herb Stone, about 30 percent of the population drops out of the running.

“They actually defy statistics,” he says, meaning that these (most likely) Tolerant Tasters score worse than chance on the taste tests. “By chance alone, they should get fifty-fifty. They don’t. You get some people with twenty percent, thirty percent, and at the other end, you get people at ninety percent correct.” Even though these people are regular consumers of the product, 30 percent of them (and of consumers of any product) can’t identify it in a blind tasting. This is hugely significant for makers of private-brand foods and drinks, because they have to market to these Tolerant Tasters without being too transparent.
YOU CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE ANYWAY, SO BUY OUR PRODUCT
! isn’t going to win any advertising awards or motivate consumers to buy. But for 25 to 30 percent of the population, it’s true.

One of our clients hired us to conduct some testing on its salad dressings versus the dressing of the competition. We recommended doing blind taste testing, in which testers evaluate the samples without knowing what brand they are tasting. Our client’s brand of salad dressing didn’t score as well as its private label competitors’ did. Yet after the tasting, we asked people to name the brand of this dressing they’d be most likely to buy. Just like well-trained consumers, they rattled off the leader’s brand. Behold the power of marketing.

Academic researchers in the field of sensory science, such as Linda Bartoshuk of the University of Florida and Barry Green from Yale University, find that the descriptive analysis method isn’t accurate enough. They argue that the differences between people are still too great to lump together and average out. Instead, they’ve come up with a new way of measuring sensory experience. It’s called the Generalized Labeled Magnitude Scale or gLMS and it’s now the standard for sensory testing in academic research. The gLMS scale is special because of its upper limit, which isn’t a 9, a 100, or a description such as “extremely intense,” all arbitrary designations that could mean one thing to you and another to me. Instead, the top of the scale—the highest score—is set by the taster.