The main factors that affect taste and taste
Starting | Du Dechun
Food has five colors and five flavors of sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and salty taste, which is the concept of Chinese food; The Japanese concept is 7 flavors.
What is flavor? What is the taste?
Keywords: threshold, taste buds, food taste.
1. The structure of the flavored substance
The structure of the odor substance is the internal factor that affects the taste sensation. Generally speaking, sugars such as glucose, sucrose, etc. are mostly sweet; Carboxylic acids such as acetic acid, citric acid, etc. are mostly sour; Salts such as sodium chloride, potassium chloride, etc. are mostly salty; Alkaloids and heavy metal salts are mostly bitter.
But they all have many exceptions, non-sugar organic salts such as saccharin and lead acetate also have a sweet taste, oxalic acid does not have a sour taste but has an astringent taste, potassium iodide is bitter and not salty, and so on.
In short, the relationship between the structure of matter and its sense of taste is very complex, and sometimes small changes in molecular structure can also greatly change their taste.
2. Temperature
The same amount of the same substance often has different thresholds depending on the temperature. Experiments have shown that the sense of taste is generally sharper around 30 °C, and when it is below 10 °C or above 50 °C, most of the tastes become sluggish.
Different flavors feel different degrees of temperature, with saccharin sweetness having the greatest effect on it and hydrochloric acidity having the least effect on it.
3. Concentration and solubility
The appropriate concentration of the taste substance usually makes people feel pleasant, and the improper concentration will make people feel unpleasant.
The effect of concentration on different taste sensations varies greatly. Generally speaking, sweetness will bring pleasant feelings at any concentration of being felt; Mere bitterness is almost always unpleasant; Sour and salty tastes make people feel pleasant at low concentrations and unpleasant at high concentrations.
Flavoring substances stimulate the taste buds only after they are dissolved. Therefore, the size of its solubility and the speed of dissolution will also make the time for the taste to be produced fast and slow, and the maintenance time is long and short.
For example, sucrose is easy to dissolve, so it produces sweetness quickly and disappears quickly; Saccharin, on the other hand, is less soluble. The taste is slower and lasts longer.
4. Interaction between substances
The taste of a substance will be significantly enhanced by the presence of another taste, a phenomenon called the multiplication of tastes. For example, sodium glutamate and 5'-inosinate can enhance each other's umami taste; Maltol can play a synergistic effect on almost any flavor, and the addition of maltol to beverages and juices can enhance sweetness.
Sometimes because of the coexistence of two taste substances, it also has an impact on people's feelings or psychology, and some people call this phenomenon the contrasting effect of taste.
For example, adding a certain amount of table salt makes people feel that the umami taste of MSG is enhanced, sprinkling a small amount of salt on watermelon will feel that the sweetness is improved, and some people in crude sugar will also feel sweeter than pure sugar due to the presence of impurities.
A phenomenon in which one substance can often weaken or inhibit the taste of another substance, called the sanitize effect of taste, for example, between sugar, citric acid, salt and quinine, if any two are mixed in an appropriate proportionate concentration, the taste of either of them will be weakened than when it exists alone.
When stimulated by a certain taste sensation for a long time, and then eat the same taste substance, it is often felt that the taste intensity decreases, this phenomenon is called the fatigue effect of taste.
The phenomenon of taste fatigue involves psychological factors. For example, eating a second piece of sugar feels less sweet than eating the first piece of sugar. Some people are accustomed to eating MSG, and the more they add, the lighter the umami taste.
In addition, there is also an influence between taste and smell objects.
Physiologically speaking, although there is a strict difference between taste and smell, due to the complex feeling formed by the mixture of taste and qi when chewing food, and the transformation between taste material and smell material, the two senses promote each other.
In short, the interaction between each flavored substance or between the odor substance and its taste.
and the psychological effects they cause; They are all very subtle, and the mechanism is also very complex, many of which are still unclear and need to be studied in depth.
Du Dechun:
Ph.D., Chief Engineer, Bakery Process Technology.
