Wines have good years and bad years. And so do oranges. With some crops the oranges mature well and the juice has the right balance of sweetness and tartness. But for most, the sweetness may be off or the variety has delayed biterness. Nothing like the crop from 1999. And if you are reading this in 2015, the crops in the last few years have not been good in the US.…
Orange juice has no added sugar. The not-from-concentrate (NFC) juice sold in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets (typically Tropicana or Minute Maid brands in the United States) has no sugar listed in the list of ingredients, yet the juice tastes sweeter than any juice I have ever squeezed. Adding to this mystery is the fact that the orange juice from Navel oranges turns bitter after some time. In the United States, the two most common oranges are the Valencia and the Navel.…
Besides the the six tastes (it’s six because of fat, see a previous post), we also have other sensations in our mouth. We can sense when something is spicy hot, as when food has cayenne or wasabi, and when it has a chemical coolant, such as the menthol in chewing gum. These sensations are different from tastes because they rely on little (molecular little) tubes on the nerve cells. They are not in our taste buds but in our mouth and throat.…
Words cost so little (0.2 cents per spoken word, I estimate). But one cannot throw taste, aroma, and flavor around. Taste comes from the sensations one gets through our taste buds in our mouth. Aroma through our nose. And flavor is the combination of aroma, taste and other sensations we get from food when we eat. There are also mechanical sensations. These include the texture, the crunchiness, the slipperiness of food, what we call mouth feel.…
Our sense of taste is not very refined. Not as refined as our sense of smell. But mess up the taste of your dish and the flavor is gone. In trying to get the flavor right, one has to start from the taste. Getting a dish to taste good requires craft, but to ruin it, just make it bitter. Just like we are born liking sweet, we instinctively dislike bitter tastes.…