If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Dinner with Kathryn and Ems, who had spent all day testing vegetable peelers and can openers for her mag. Now far be it from me to commit myself to spending eight hours beside a stack of raw veg with my hands in a bowl of cold water, but Ems does have the most varied job of anyone I know.

The other day, it was group testing Christmas crackers. Another time, getting random men in the street to sniff strips of perfumed card and pick out the one they liked best.

Tonight, then, she gave us the benefit of her taste testing training, and the secret of how you can really appreciate food.

To begin with, you need to have an understanding of how the human tongue works, and know that it is made up of only four different kinds of taste receptors, capable of tasting, respectively, sweet, sour, bitter and salt.

That’s all.

Nothing else.

Not coffee, or strawberry cream, basil, jelly or cod.

What a boring life the tongue has.

So, to best explain how to evaluate how something tastes, you should pinch your nose before you take the first mouthful. Do it with jelly beans, Ems explained, and you’ll only taste the sugar, because it interacts with the sweet-aware taste buds and is invisible to everything else. But, when you’re half way through chewing and everything is mashed up, stop pinching your nose and you’ll immediately be hit by the most intense flavour you can imagine. What would otherwise have been a fairly bland orange will now be the most mond blowing burst of fresh citrus. Blueberries will taste like they have just been picked, and coconut like it was split open just minutes before.

What a fantastic course to be sent on.

It sure beats time management.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.