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Taste: Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good
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About Taste: Surprising Stories And Science About Why
Product Description Whether it’s a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup or a salted caramel coated in dark chocolate, you know when food tastes good. Now here’s the amazing story behind why you love some foods and can’t tolerate others. Whether it’s a salted caramel or pizza topped with tomatoes and cheese, you know when food tastes good. Now, Barb Stuckey, a seasoned food developer to whom food companies turn for help in creating delicious new products, reveals the amazing story behind why you love some foods and not others. Through fascinating stories, you’ll learn how our five senses work together to form flavor perception and how the experience of food changes for people who have lost their sense of smell or taste. You’ll learn why kids (and some adults) turn up their noses at Brussels sprouts, how salt makes grapefruit sweet, and why you drink your coffee black while your spouse loads it with cream and sugar. Eye-opening experiments allow you to discover your unique “taster type” and to learn why you react instinctively to certain foods. You’ll improve your ability to discern flavors and devise taste combinations in your own kitchen for delectable results. What Harold McGee did for the science of cooking Barb Stuckey does for the science of eating in Taste—a calorie-free way to get more pleasure from every bite. Review "A mouthwatering exploration of the science of taste ... Stuckey tantalizes readers with details about the intricacies of taste." ― Publishers Weekly "Fascinating…A must for any food lover" ― San Francisco Chronicle “Try following even a handful of these pointers and your enjoyment of food will increase markedly.” ― Chicago Tribune “When it comes to fulfilling food, quality can be a substitute for quantity if only we know how to appreciate it – a skill that can be developed by reading this fine book.” ― Financial Times About the Author Barb Stuckey is a professional food developer who leads the marketing, food trend tracking, and consumer research functions at Mattson, North America’s largest independent developer of new foods and beverages. She and her HyperTaster fiancé divide their time between San Francisco and Healdsburg, in Northern California’s wine country. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction What Are You Missing? A humble tortilla chip changed my life. Most people who are obsessed with food have a different kind of epiphany. Their eye-opening, revelatory moments take place in storybook locations: a first taste of cheese made from unpasteurized milk in Aix-en-Provence. Or a fish, just plucked from the water and given a quick steam in banana leaves on a beach in Vietnam. Or a forkful of deconstructed gazpacho in Spain that made them understand—no, really understand the local fascination with chilled tomato soup. There’s always a moment, but mine was much less romantic and, instead of opening up a world of flavor, it taught me just how little I knew about how to taste food. My moment happened in a laboratory in Foster City, California, at the northern tip of Silicon Valley. In 20,000 square feet of stainless-steel lab bench tops with overhead fluorescent lighting, surrounded by homogenizers, colloid mills, dough sheeters, impingement ovens, pH meters, and tube-in-tube heat exchangers, I encountered a tortilla chip that would change my life. I had just arrived at Mattson, the food development company where I still work as a professional food inventor. Our founder, Pete Mattson, had asked me to help with a project for a snack food company. Like many other companies, this client had enlisted our services to help it develop a new product. Our team had been tweaking the client’s formula for a tortilla chip that would be sold in grocery stores. To me, there didn’t seem to be much room for creativity: tortilla chips are little more than cornmeal, salt, and some kind of fat. I mean, come on. How hard coult it be? One morning as I arrived at the
