Taste Buds

It’s common for folks to think that eating healthy means that food can’t have any flavor. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Understanding the flavors in ingredients and how they blend together is key to getting great results in your kitchen.

There are five types of receptors on the tongue that sense the flavors we taste. They are salt, sweet, bitter, sour and one called umami. Each of these flavors acts on its own, but how they interact with each other is key to making recipes taste fantastic. Activation of any one taste will enhance another taste bud. Blending the flavors is important in all cooking and is the basis for great-tasting healthy recipes.

Sour
The sour taste buds are activated by acidic foods, and they are activated very rapidly. As a result, these flavors can quickly brighten an otherwise dull dish. They can, however, also overpower a dish very easily.

The properties of salt react with acids and soften the sour flavors in a recipe. In doing so, sweetness is enhanced.

Salt
Salty foods are obvious in and of themselves (like a salty pretzel), but just a little salt will enhance the other taste buds. In doing so, the salty flavor gives good balance to other tastes. Adding a little salt to something sweet, such as chocolate, enhances the sugary flavor of the chocolate.

Because it doesn’t take very much salt to activate the taste buds, you can use salt in healthy cooking. With experimentation, I have found that it takes at least 300 to 400mg of sodium to make a main-course recipe salty enough to properly activate the salt tastebuds. It takes a little less for side dishes (300mg is about 1/8th tsp.)

Sweet
Sweet flavors are probably more able than any of the other tastes to stand on their own. Certainly, sweetness helps to enhance other flavors. Lemonade is a perfect example. Some people like bitter lemons, but most of us like a lemon flavor better if it has been sweetened.

Bitter
Bitter is not exactly sour, but people often confuse the two. Bitter flavors include those in cabbage, radicchio, spinach and collard greens. One of my favorite examples of a good balance of flavors is collard greens made with a touch of maple syrup, salt and lemon. Using just a little bit of the sweet, salty and sour flavors doesn’t “mask” but enhances the bitter flavor of the greens.

Umami

Umami?… Ooooo MAAHHH mee.

This has become one of my favorite words. I just love saying it – umami, umami, umami. It sounds like a Buddhist chant--a very sensuous word. It is also at the center of one of my favorite tidbits of food information.

Umami is usually defined as the taste of foods that are pungent or aromatic, like mushrooms or cheese or roasted chicken. It is sometimes described as “savory,” but it is much more complex.

The umami taste has long been recognized by the Japanese, but only recently has it been seriously considered by other scientists. Western researchers had felt that there only the four other tastes existed. The perception of savory foods was simply felt to be the combination of two or more of the taste buds being activated.

Knowing about this fifth taste is critical in healthy cooking. Emphasizing and enhancing umami flavors makes it much easier to successfully create healthy recipes that taste great. Because umami flavors seem to convey a feeling of comfort, focusing on those flavors helps me create dishes that are emotionally as well as physically satisfying. For instance, roasting mushrooms until they are browned to the point of being caramelized intensifies their rich umami flavor. This can be done with almost no added fat, so recipes can be lush and satisfying with fewer fat and calories.

Similarly, the finest-quality Parmesans or other aged cheeses may be higher in fat, but the better-quality cheese has a more intense umami flavor—so you can use less in a particular recipe. Just 1 oz. of authentic Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano adds a lovely, complex, mellow umami flavor that’s also salty and slightly sweet.

As you are looking at recipes, cooking meals and eating dinner, think about the all of the flavors in the dish. How can they be enhanced? By paying attention to the balance of all five flavors, you can understand the importance of each of the tastes in determining how satisfying your food is.

Timothy S. Harlan, M.D., a.k.a. Dr. Gourmet
Drgourmet.com