Go eat some chocolate. Right now.
What does it taste like? Try and describe the taste. I dare ya.
Turns out, there’s a lot going on when we eat complex foods like chocolate, and a simple description is hard. Most times, people given the “describe chocolate” challenge try for a few minutes, then eventually throw their hands up in irritation and say something along the lines of “it tastes GOOD. Shut up, you stupid food scientist man.”
Why is chocolate hard to describe? Hell, why is ANY food hard to describe to someone who has never tried it? The answer is more complicated than you think. This post will unwind some of the mystery surrounding how we taste foods and how that taste intersects with aroma and texture to create FLAVOR.
Taste versus Flavor
Taste is what happens on your tongue. It revolves around 5 (and potentially 6 – 7) main characteristics: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami (as well as fat and dairy – we’ll get into that a little later). These tastes combine, balancing or enhancing one another as they encounter your taste buds.
In fact, taste buds are pretty one dimensional – they ONLY register those 5 – 7 basic tastes and nothing else. If your taste buds were eye balls, you would only see shapes… but no colors. For the color, you need AROMA.
Your taste buds are marvelous things, but when you eat chocolate, what they are sensing alone is NOT HOW YOU ARE “TASTING” THAT DELICIOUS TREAT.
Before we get into what taste buds CAN’T register, let’s talk about what they DO. Here are the classically accepted “tastes” that your taste buds recognize. While you look over the chart, please note that each of the “tastes” are nothing more than chemicals and each are associated with keeping you alive and healthy.
How Taste Buds Work
When you stick a bar of chocolate in your mouth and start to chew, your taste buds go to work, interpreting the chemical information in that chocolate bar, but ONLY in terms of what they can “read.” In order for that to happen, a number of things need to occur first.
MASTICATE
Before your taste buds can go to work, you have to break down the chemical compounds in that food into particles small enough for your taste buds to detect them. Chew on that Milky Way slowly (don’t chomp like a starving chihuahua with a death wish). Turns out “I ate so fast I couldn’t taste anything” can actually happen.
While you are chewing, your teeth are grinding the chocolate into smaller and smaller chemical particles.
SALIVATE
Then enzymes in your saliva go to work, helping to break down the cocoa compounds even further. Saliva does something else as well, serving as sort of a “flavor bus,” carrying the tasty chocolate sludge over your tongue. Those chemical compounds are transported to collections of taste receptors on your tongue while you chew called papillae.
Those bumps on your tongue? They aren’t taste buds. You would need a microscope to see one of those. The bumps are colonies of taste buds called papillae (or papilla, if you’re just talking about one). Each papilla is a little different.
Three Kinds of Papillae
- Fungiform papillae
- Located near the tip of your tongue; the most common type with up to 400 and three to five taste buds each.
- Foliate papillae
- Look like folds along the sides of your tongue near the back.
- There are about 20 and they may each have several hundred buds.
- Circumvallate papillae
- Form a V at the back of your tongue.
- There are 12 Circumvallate and they are big enough for you to feel and see. They contain thousands of bitter-sensitive taste buds. They cause you to gag and spit out a bitter substance that could be toxic.
Taste Maps
Until fairly recently, students were taught that taste buds on different parts of the tongue tasted different things. They were encouraged to do “taste experiments” and draw “taste maps” of where they experienced flavor.
Turns out… those teachers were REALLY wrong. The popular belief that there are specific taste areas on the tongue comes from a German study conducted in 1901.
Actually, ALL taste buds contain the receptors to register ALL available tastes.
As far as we know.
The MIGHTY Taste Bud
Each papilla contains between 50-100 taste buds – tiny taste analyzers – each with 10 – 50 taste receptors: cells which individually register salty, sweet, sour, bitter, fatty, or rich (umami) flavors. They “taste” these compounds using gustatory hairs called microvilli that stick out of each papilla’s “top” like little antenna.
The microvilli wave around, right on the surface of the papilla, sensing whatever chemicals wander by.
Fun Fact About: Aging Taste Buds
1. Your taste buds regenerate every 8 – 10 days, More often if you scald them with very hot foods or injure them by eating EXCESSIVELY spicy items. The taste buds in your mouth TOday were not there when you had dinner three weeks ago.
2. the very Young have more taste buds than older people – taste buds regenerate slower and slower as you age until they stop regenerating at all. This is probably why children don’t like Brussel Sprouts and old people do. Kids can literally Taste the bitter chemical compounds in the Braccia family of vegetables better.
How it all fits together
When you chew food and your saliva breaks down surface proteins and spreads it around, the microvilli sense the 5 – 7 tastes they can perceive and send that information to your brain on the “Gustatory Pathway.” Gustatory simply means having to do with taste or flavor. Here’s a sentence I’ve spoken once or twice during my teaching career: “That macaroni and cheese you burnt was a gustatory nightmare.”
There. Understand the word better?
The Gustatory Pathway
When receptor cells on your taste buds encounter the chemical compounds they evolved to register (sweet, sour, salty, and the rest), they fire a signal which travels along a variety of cranial nerves, through the “hindbrain” at the base of the spine – the Medulla Oblongata – to the Thalamus.
The Thalamus works a bit more nerve cell magic and sends messages to THREE parts of the brain, all at the same time. The message it sends to the Somatosensory and Frontal Cortex (for taste obsessed researchers, nicknamed the “Gustatory Cortex), is concerned with conscious identification.
Sweet and Sour taste receptors send “Hey, brain! This chocolate covered strawberry is sugary and tart.” Bitter receptors send ”Hey, this chocolate has a bit of a bitter aftertaste.” Umami receptors say “it isn’t very rich.”
What happens in the Gustatory Cortex? How does all this information get merged together into a single sensation? Nobody knows.
Interesting thing to note:
- There are two additional areas in your brain where taste signals get sent. One has to do with emotion and the other with memory.
- Do you LIKE what you are eating? That question is answered in the Amygdala Hypothalamus. Liking or disliking a food is NOT a conscious decision. That’s why the food you grew up with always “tastes” better than the same thing made by someone else.
- Do you remember eating something like this before? Did you like it last time? That question is answered in the Hippocampus. Aroma memories are more powerful than taste memories – more potent. When I smell brewing coffee and biscuits at the same time I am transported back to my grandmother’s kitchen. The TASTE of biscuits and gravy don’t do that… it is the SMELL. Memories of taste are still powerful and there is a specific pathway in your brain that evolved just so you could remember past eating experiences.
Fun Facts About: New “Tastes”
1. Umami has only been recognized as a distinct taste since 1990.
2. Scientists have found a new taste receptor which specializes in fat. Most Flavor Scientists believe Fat will be announced as the 6th taste very soon.
3. Scientists believe they have also found a 7th taste – Dairy or calcium.
More about how we taste
The Little Filiform That Could (Perceive Heat, Temperature, and Texture)
The last three elements of flavor are established by the most numerous papillae on the tongue: filiform papillae. For a very long time, most people thought that the filiform papillae – those thousands of tiny bumps towards the front of your tongue – registered sweet things.
Nope.
The filiform papillae contain NO taste receptors. Instead they register texture, spice, and temperature and send that information to the brain for processing along the trigeminal nerve.
Some people with a superabundance of these receptors can’t tolerate mushy foods (like undercooked eggs or rare steak), others can’t tolerate spicy foods, and still others need their food to be at a specific temperature to enjoy it. There is research that indicates the filiform papillae may register other information about food as well, but the results are so far inconclusive.
Stay tuned.
A word on spice
For some bizarre reason, “spicy” is not considered a taste because there are ZERO taste receptors for the chemicals that makes food taste spicy, a few of which are listed below:
- capsaicin, found in many hot peppers
- allyl isothiocyanate, found in wasabi, mustard, radish
- piperine, found in white and black peppercorns
- gingerol, found in ginger
While there aren’t taste receptors for hot sauce, the filiform papillae DO register the sensation as burning. Why do you sweat when you eat hot things? Your brain is LITERALLY trying to put out a fire.
Fun Facts About: Supertasters
65% of the population are average Tasters with about 500 Papillae and 1,000 taste buds.
“SUPERTASTERS” make up 25% of the population and have up to 1,000 papillae (which means a super-taster can have up to 10,000 taste buds!). Supertasters rarely like chocolate or coffee – the bitterness is too much for them. They are sad, sad people.
Nontasters (those with very few taste buds) are much more rare than Supertasters – about 10%.
What does all this have to do with chocolate?
When we start talking about balancing flavors so that food is more appealing, more appetizing, what we are REALLY talking about is balancing TASTES.
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and fat tastes can all be balanced. The flavors that come from Aroma – the volatile flavor compounds (VFCs) can’t be balanced, only highlighted or diminished.
Generally speaking, balancing flavors is about finding the right blend of each of the core components your taste buds can recognize. Bitter chocolate can be balanced with sugar. Add enough sugar and it doesn’t taste bitter anymore (just ask anyone addicted to those sugary coffee drinks at St@rbucks. Hiding burnt espresso under a pound of sugar is their specialty).
In other foods, sweet balances spicy, sour balances sweet… and so on. This is the most likely reason Thai and Spicy Chinese foods are so very popular: they have a balance of fat, umami, sweet, salty, spicy, and sour flavors going on AT THE SAME TIME.
My personal favorite thing to eat right now is Buffalo Fried Chicken Tenders on Waffles drenched in Maple Syrup. It’s served at “The Porch” in Winter Park, Florida and is, in my opinion, the best bad-for-you food in the world. Why? It is a perfect, balanced blend of all the tastes possible for my brain to recognize.
Is it expensive? Yes. Stupidly so. And I want to go eat it right now.
Further Reading
The Science Behind Spicy Foods