The grill chars the plump rib-eye, tattooing it with hatch marks and dressing it with crust. A knife pierces the meat, divides it, unveiling a cross- section of shades of red from scarlet to pink. Aromas rise. The smell? Charred meat.
Mmm.
But the heart of the rib-eye experience remains: the flavor.
If it’s done right, the steak will taste like . . . grilled rib-eye. As you chew, you might wonder about the magic that determines the taste of a cut of beef. You also might ask: What the heck is flavor, anyway? How does it work?
Good question. It’s complicated.
Combination of senses
“Taste is what is coming from your tongue. Flavor is a combination of taste and retronasal olfaction, which is when air is forced behind your palate and comes into the naval cavity, backwards,” said Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste.
Without the nose, all your mouth would detect are sensations like bitter and sour. The nose is a necessary dance partner in the weird chemistry that determines flavor.
You probably have encountered the “tongue map,” that illustration detailing how different parts of the tongue experience taste in distinctive ways. If you remember anything about the map, dismiss it all. Scientists say the map is fiction.
“We’ve known it was wrong for 40 years,” said Bartoshuk. “It’s actually a litmus test about whether people know anything about taste at all.”
Instead, the entire tongue detects taste. Bartoshuk says there are only four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salt.
Others call for a fifth, called “umami,” a Japanese word meant to convey meaty or savory. Meat, cheese and mushrooms, for example, have umami. Bartoshuk doesn’t believe that umami is a taste.
Nose knows flavor
Either way, whether it’s a cup of coffee’s bitterness or the burst of sour that comes with a bite of pickle, it’s the nose that takes the taste — say, bitter — and turns it into a flavor. It’s the nose that gives that mug of Sumatra more than the sense of bitter in your mouth, that suggests the brew has hints of tobacco, cedar and maybe even grapefruit.
Bartoshuk suggests an experiment. Pinch your nose closed and chew on a piece of chocolate. Think about what you taste — you will sense sweet, and possibly a little hit of bitter, but not chocolate. As you chew, unplug your nose. Chocolate.
Beyond vanilla and chocolate
Peter Arendsen and Daniel Cofrades weren’t thinking about retronasal olfaction while they sat at a table in Jill’s Restaurant in Boulder, scribbling on a sheet of paper. But they were fixated on flavor.
“It will be a deconstructed cake,” said Spanish chef Cofrades, dressed in his chef’s whites, using a pen to draw what looked like a stream. Cofrades envisioned a dessert plate resembling an outdoor tableau, with greenery (he would use baby sorrel), dirt (chocolate cake, shredded) and a stream fashioned out of ice cream. “Ice cream will be butternut squash. The chocolate won’t be as sweet, more bitter. The sweetness will come from the ice cream.”
“We’re talking about star anise and cinnamon in it, too,” said Arendsen, the owner of Ice Cream Alchemy in Boulder.
It would be Arendsen’s job to develop an ice cream that punches with flavor, one that startles. The two have brainstormed on desserts for over a year.
“Hibiscus lemon,” says Colfrades later, smiling, looking at Arendsen and reminiscing. “That was a good one.”
Arendsen understands tastes that startle. He makes bacon ice cream. Caramelized onion ice cream. Red onion, and caper, and gorgonzola cheese ice creams. He churns a cheddar cheese, cornbread and chive ice cream. The chef who wanted the product placed dollops of it in bowls of chili.
“You’re always thinking about new flavors. What is new, what is different, what is fun,” said Arendsen, a shaved- head former bicycle racer with a master’s degree in history who followed another passion — that of his sweet tooth — into his ice cream business. “If you hate truffles, you will hate my truffle ice cream. It comes down to what your palate likes on a personal level.”
A marriage of savory and sweet
Arendsen’s eagerness to mix sweet and savory speaks to a larger flavor trend now unspooling in the factories and restaurants of America, said Jorge de la Torre, dean of culinary education at Johnson and Wales University in Denver.
“Savory herbs and flavors showing up in sweet applications and vice-versa, that is the new trend,” said de la Torre. “Bacon chocolate bars. Salted caramels. They are mixing black pepper and strawberry and vinegar. They are mixing a lot.”
Mixing flavors is part of the art of creating flavor, he said. Successful pairings tend to either complement each other — think mushroom sauce and steak, both of which have an earthy, “umami” (or whatever) taste — or stand in contrast, like butter and lemon.
Chefs think about how flavors work together all the time — basically, it’s their job. Fluency in the chemistry of flavor comes with training, but more important, with a lot of experience.
“To become a chef, you have to have a flavor profile in your head that says, ‘This would go with this,’ ” de la Torre said. “It’s through experience and time that you say, ‘You know what? Mint and basil are from the same family. Why not try a basil mojito instead of a mint mojito?’ ”
His advice to home cooks: Keep on cooking, keep on experimenting — and think about how things taste, and how they might mix, as you go. Take notes.
90 percent product, 10 percent technique
Jeff Osaka, a chef and the owner of Twelve Restaurant in Denver, said he leverages his “memory bank” extensively when he cooks. In the end, though, he likes to keep things simple. Instead of toiling to turn dishes into complicated tapestries of flavor, he shoots for blending just a few.
“A lot of it is masked with too many seasonings, or drowning in sauce, so you don’t get the true flavor out of the ingredients,” he said. “I would say 90 percent of cooking is the product and 10 percent is technique.”
And before people go crazy in their kitchens, Osaka recommends that they first learn how to eat — something he calls a “lost art.”
“There is a lot of bad food out there that people are accepting as great food,” he said. “It goes back to training your taste buds to what is good and what is not.”
He also champions the tiny touches, the almost subliminal flavors, that make big differences.
“I have a friend who was talking about the ramen he had the other day in Los Angeles, about how just the smallest touch of something, how big of an influence something has upon a dish,” he added. “Just a drop of sesame oil on the top of the broth, the hot broth reacting to the sesame oil, that scent just exploding in the dish. It’s those little things that still amaze me. If you are not paying attention, you might miss it.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
