About Taste and Texture

First of all, I want to thank all comments on the first post. It is always wonderful to know people are reading and enjoying, but above all, it is good to learn from the readers as well.

Taylor’s comment made me think about a new subject to talk about. For those who can’t raed italian, I’ll explain. Taylor is wondering whether it is better to mix all cheeses into a sauce, instead of eating them “as they are” while drinking good beer, if there is a Synergy on the final product”.

Synergy

As a starting point, the word synergy seems extremely appropriated to talk about cuisines.

Synergy is the phenomenon of joining things toghether to create a final product of more impact that the sum of the parts.

Of course in kitchen is all about synergy. Take for instance the pasta itself.

Pasta is usually no more than flour, semolina, water and eggs. While we can drink water and eat a scrambled egg, it is dificult to imagine flour and semolina being good by themselves.

Even the scrambled egg would probably had salt, joining eggs and salt certainly creates synergy.

To complete the discussion take spices. Spices are not meant to be eaten by themselves, ultimately, the role of spices is to increase the synergy of the dish.

Synaesthesia

Some specialist say that all our taste is based on four basic tastes that our tongue is capable to detect through srtuctures called taste buds.

We have taste buds to detect Salty, Sour, Sweet and Bitter (There is controversy about a fifth one called Umami, but that is irrelevant to our discussion).

What industrialized, artificially flavored food does, is to recriate the levels of the basic tastes, and through that you car really fell strawberry flavor on any cheap youghurt.

However, real taste is a lot more complex than that. Even if you could map all tastes and create an exact replica of your favorite food, taste takes a lot more things into account: texture, humidity, smell, even the ambiance.

At this point I want to introduce a word to complement the discussion: Synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is the neurological mix of senses. For instance when you think a color is “screamming at you”.

Kitchen is also all about synaesthesy. That is why this blog is about food and lifestyle, is not possible to talk about the food without the lifestyle, because eating and cooking are synaesthesic processes.

What about the cheese discussion?

And what about Taylor’s wonderings? Well, eating cheese while drinking good beer or wine is something I love. I would probably be eating cheese and drinking something while I prepare the sauce. But the sauce is supposed to use on pasta, bruscheta or whatever you like, so it is suposed to be all mixed up and mix with other flavors.

besides, you have the texture, that is very important. Mixing all those ingredients confuses the taste in a very pleasant way. Just to do a very synaesthesic comparison, the cheese sauce is like listen to an orchestra, while eating cheeses separately is like listening to each instrument.

The choice of doing the sauce or not is all about synergy and synaesthesy.

Have fun!