Even Apple Pie Can Change
This weekend I tried something new with two favorite recipes. I added roasted red peppers to my mac n cheese. And I combined mangos and apples to make a pie (see the recipe below)
The new additions provided something to the recipe that was right for my sense of taste. And if you’re going to cook – this is what you do to get the joy food is meant to have.
It wasn’t my intention to change recipes I’ve made for years. But I didn’t have enough apples to make a pie. And I was out of the tomatoes I would usually add to my mac n cheese.
Two new recipes are born.
Making changes to existing recipes requires an understanding of flavor and which food could be a suitable substitute for another. But this is subjective. It’s based on your sense of taste.
And no one can tell you that you don’t have any taste – they don’t live in your mouth and can’t say what you’re tasting when you eat.
Changing a recipe doesn’t require great cooking knowledge. This is about flavor.
There’s a reason we are always experimenting with our food to help it meet our taste expectations. It’s all about our taste receptors.
It’s natural for us to change the flavor of our food. We always have. The simplest example of this is the addition of ketchup to a meal to make it more palatable. It was the only way I could tolerate liver when I was a child.
But why do we do this?
It’s because of the different amounts of taste receptors in our mouths for different tastes. Some of us have more sweet receptors. For others, it’s more bitter receptors or sour or salty. Or maybe some people have more of the elusive umami receptors – the flavor no one can explain.
And all of these taste receptors, when activated, send messages to the brain.
So, are you wrong if you like a given recipe to have more of a sweet taste than someone else might like? No, you’re probably responding to the number of sweet receptors in your mouth.
We don’t know exactly what this means for the function of the body. But there has to be a reason that we can taste different flavors and feel the need to combine them.
We do know that when something sweet locks onto a sweet receptor, the message the brain receives is that energy has arrived.
And there’s speculation that the bitter taste is to warn us of poisons or toxins. But that makes no sense since so many foods we love have a bitter taste like chocolate and coffee. What do we often do with a bitter taste? We add sweetness to it. We do this with sour as well. Sweet and salty go together, too.
And who knows what we do with umami? Mushrooms are considered to be umami. We caramelize them or cook them in butter and/or wine or bury them under the tomato sauce and cheese on a pizza.
We’re always doing something to make food to our liking.
The science of flavor is fascinating and the more we know, the more we will enjoy our food. It can even help us mask the flavor of foods we feel we should eat but we don’t like.
And I can prove it. Join me this Saturday for a min-workshop: Flavor For Health and Happiness
In this workshop, we’ll discuss:
Primary and secondary flavors
How the body uses both of these flavors
The best way to balance the different tastes
The science that makes sense of all this
Plus, we’ll do a taste experiment to show you how to mask the flavor of something you don’t like. You can do this at home along with me. Just have on hand something you don’t like that can be easily mixed with other flavors. I’ll be using chlorella powder. Any non-flavored green powder will do like wheat grass or moringa powder. But it can be anything you don’t like. Also have one hand something sweet, sour, spicy, and salty you can add.
You’ll be amazed how you can mask a flavor you don’t like.