best of the five tastes

In English, however, "brothy", "meaty", or "savory" have been proposed as alternative translations.

ew

Umami
Sour
Salty
Bitter
Sweet

Salty

sweeeeet

this is ridiculously hard! have become a big fan of bitter over the past few years, but it's hard to go past umami i think. definitely not sweet

Salty.

Umami
Sour
Salty
Bitter
Sweet

― and ya thought that shit played out in ILX (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 8:45 AM

^^^^^

remind me of umami again?

sorry, didn't see the link. will educate myself

so it's just 'salty'?

umami is so fat when she came down the stairs i thought eastenders was starting

when umami sit in a room she sit next to e'body

salt overrated, people who automatically reach for the salt cellar are disgusting savages

btw big health news story of the day: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hiZe0Kts-rjANq-K8NoItEI8Sztw

only ever add salt to spag bol and before cooking a steak these days, but at the same time a bag of crisps every now and again is a filthy salt hit

no way is salt overrated! i hate it when food is underseasoned

what i'm hearing- "I hate it when i can taste the food and not the salt" tbh

umami is best and also worst.

Best because of the name.

Worst because of MSG.

I don't use salt with food anymore, but I miss it, boy, I miss it

Salt brings out a lot of tastes besides saltiness -- I put salt on my oatmeal this morning to make the oats taste more rounded, roasted, you could even say "nutty".

did not realise there was a difference between sour and bitter.

what taste is chili?

only ever add salt to spag bol

waht, never done this

Also in comparison to a touch of salt, the berries tasted sweeter without having any addl sugar on them. Win/win!

i have the biggest sweet tooth but love some bitterness with it. that is how i like them apples.

salt on apples = disgusting savage.

Salt brings out a lot of tastes besides saltiness -- I put salt on my oatmeal this morning to make the oats taste more rounded, roasted, you could even say "nutty".

― Ask foreigners and they will tell you the gospel comes from America. (Laurel), Wednesday, 21 April 2010 15:19 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is otm, and what i mean when i say i hate underseasoned food. using salt in yr cooking is key to bringing out the flavour

Saltiness is a dud, but my dog Salty is a definate classic.

btw big health news story of the day:

The headline reads, "Americans eat too much salt: study". That made me chuckle. It's search engine optimized to the point of near-absurdity, and besides, Americans eat too much, period.

sour

I voted salt, but salt is nothing without food to put it on. In fact, it's deadly.

mainly cuz haribo tangfastics are the shiznit xp

umami is so tasty her blood type is bolognese sauce

wait, I think I said that wrong

"her" being "Sweet Pea the eight-month-old veal calf"

only ever add salt to spag bol

waht, never done this

― mdskltr (blueski)

eh while cooking, and upon reflection yeah laurel and just sayin otm.

umami is crucial but is it the "best"? i enjoy funky savory ripeness but not at every damn meal. umami breakfast dnw

what once was sweet now tastes so bitter

where does spicy fall in all of this

im just a picante motherfucker, preemz

Brothy!

m bison w/the truthbomb, if I can't vote Tamazula then fuck this shit

salty. sweet close second

I'm no scientist but I think "spicy" is probably not considered a flavor because it's not detected by the taste buds? Or at least not solely detected by the taste buds?

Something like that?

I don't want to talk to a scientist, those motherfuckers lyin' & gettin' me pissed

srsly, food scientists need 2 change the rules immediately

i can head next door and pick from about 78 flavours of 'spicy, but they ain't got no 'umami' crisps where i'm from- someone should tell the scientists

bitter! love my squash, zucchini, grapefruit, black licorice, spinach.

bitter can be really intriguing...I love me some Campari and soda.

i don't rly consider squash or zucchini bitter

sweet! cookies, flower nectar, fruits, flakey pastries and sometimes water if you live in the right place.

umami, because really good cheese is like magic. although really its a mix of different flavors, i think "umami" is dominant in cheese. but with some quince paste for sweetness contrast it is the best of both worlds.

you know why they have that phrase "like eating your dessert first"

because sweet is the best and everyone know it, doy

i don't rly consider squash or zucchini bitter

― la senora (surm), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 12:56 PM

^^ spinach neither, more like kale

I do have this hypothesis that we are like way lacking in this dept. as far as STUDIES and SCIENCE et al. Ppl only started acknowledging 'umami' w/in my lifetime. I have gotten so much shit in my life for my (accurate) stance that although I was born w/out a sense of smell I can still taste things just fine. Like I have as well-developed a palate as anyone, if not better, but peeps are ALWAYS always like, "No, you can't taste anything." Bcz taste = smell apparently, in the minds of all. We are operating from an inadequate set of information! Wld love for there to be some more research on this.

My idea of dessert is saving that tenderest part of the ribeye and that section of baked potato that soaked up all the juices for last.

guys salt isn't really all that bad for you

the institute of medicine disagrees with you

thought salt is only bad when you don't take in enough water

the word 'umami' annoys me - it's foodie jargon / 'I am of the knowledged few who know about this secret and mysterious taste'.

should just call it 'savoriness'

actually it's japanese

ACTUALLY

oh wow thx for that info

also, saying one of the basic tastes is "meaty" is just gross

J Seingarten says salt really isn't that bad for you and I choose to agree. Other authorities are just being over-cautious and/or pitching their advice for the most susceptible fragment of the population because they can't afford to be wrong/sued.

salt is bad if you are a fat sloth iirc.

cheese isn't really umami iirc; salty + fatty =/= umami.

something like e.g. a really good parmasean is an exception i think, because it has that ripe nutty (forgive me) vomitous aroma

the institute of medicine disagrees with you

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:05 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

ACTUALLY no it doesn't

SS otm---yr body regulates salt excretion pretty exquisitely. if yr hypertensive then yeah ok maybe cut back on the salt but a relatively high-salt diet isn't nearly as bad for you as, say, sugar. they did a study in holland (iirc) that plotted blood pressure in two cohorts (one salt-heavy, one salt-restricted) and after an initial spike in BP, the salt-heavy group eventually normalized. yr body is pretty good at knowing when you're retaining water, and will spill electrolytes as needed.

I feel like no one knows anything about food.

Food is a mystery.

I don't want to talk about it though.

I know about umami

umami so fat, when she sits around the house she really sits AROUND the house

umami chula

cheese isn't really umami iirc; salty + fatty =/= umami.

something like e.g. a really good parmasean is an exception i think, because it has that ripe nutty (forgive me) vomitous aroma

what category would you put "fatty" under? a lot of cheeses have a nutty flavor. i think most cheese is a mixture of savory, salty, and bitter.

not talking about processed cheese, btw.

but thinking bout cheese just highlights how inadequate the five basic tastes are for describing what things actually taste like

true, but that's not really their purpose. you might as well criticise red, green, and blue for being inadequate tools for describing what things look like.

but red, green and blue are really good tools for describing what things look like

this salt argument is gonna be really awesome I can feel it

but red, green and blue are really good tools for describing what things look like

not for describing, you wouldn't say yellow is a bit reddy, a bit greeny. it's just yellow.

colors are bad tools for describing colors? I guess?

I don't really know what you mean by 'describe' cause "that fire-engine is red" seems like a description to me

if any of you really feel that salt is the biggest vice-related terror facing you, i commend you on your terribly boring lives

xp, primary colour descriptions break down when you're not describing primary colours. the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

i say again: salt isn't a vice, ppl

we could talk about colors in terms of what proportion of each primary color it seems to have, but its easier to just have a word for each color as it appears. i guess the basic tastes are supposed to be analogous to the primary colors? but i don't think flavors and smells really exist on a spectrum like wavelengths of light.

grate thread.

i guess the basic tastes are supposed to be analogous to the primary colors? but i don't think flavors and smells really exist on a spectrum like wavelengths of light.

but aren't the neurological processes involved similar? ie you have certain receptors that get activated when you taste bitter/when you see blue? been awhile since i studied this stuff.

i really have no clue. it just seems like light is made of photons that travel in waves, so you can break it down into a linear spectrum of wavelengths, but the chemical compounds that make up the food that we eat are so varied and complex it seems like the "primary flavors" thing wouldn't hold up. like how do the the basic flavors combine to create smokiness? idk, it seems like they must know something about the chemical reactions of tasting things that led them to deciding on these five tastes, but it doesn't make intuitive sense to me like colors do.

if you feel inclined you can do a poll of what wikipedia lists as 'further sensations'

3 Further sensations
3.1 Fattiness
3.2 Calcium
3.3 Dryness
3.4 Metallicness
3.5 Prickliness or hotness
3.6 Coolness
3.7 Numbness
3.8 Heartiness (Kokumi)
3.9 Temperature

like how do the the basic flavors combine to create smokiness?

Have to factor in sense of smell iirc. Hence not being able to taste food when you've got a cold.

The second result on a google search for "further sensations" is the official website of Robert Plant.

salt overrated, people who automatically reach for the salt cellar are disgusting savages

― the big pink suede panda bear hurts (ledge), Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:09 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is serious suggest ban material.

hit me, i got SBs to spare

Ledge OTM as long as the emphasis is on the automatically.

Umami is like the nintendo taste bonus level

xxpost:

http://img4.realsimple.com/images/0901/salt-shaker_300.jpg
You wanna make something of this?

Bitter>Sweet>>Sour>Umami>>>>>>>>>Salty

Not convinced by salting everything, I don't salt pasta, not out of ideology but just because it seems pointless & it'd take more than anecdote&insistence to make me start. So much of taste is psychological, n/a's statement about food being mysterious seems otm.

and by psychological I mean strongly affected by pre-conceptions &c. rather than just in the phenomenal realm

I salt pasta because it's a giant molecular load of "food", on whatever level, and does not contain any seasoning of its own (being made with, what, flour and water and one egg or whatever?). If you salt your sauce to its proper taste level, and then add it to unsalted pasta, you've thrown off the salt-per-mass-unit by 2x over (or more). Same with rice. Things you add to the prepared food item are ALSO food and also require their own seasoning.

I do salt pasta when cooking it tbh

Sound reasoning but I'm not convinced by yr founding premise of "proper taste level"

IDK in some ways I think I am a very undiscriminating eater, there's very little food I dislike, even tho I enjoy the good stuff much more.

laurel otm

If you salt your sauce to its proper taste level, and then add it to unsalted pasta, you've thrown off the salt-per-mass-unit by 2x over (or more).

This doesn't make sense to me. Surely the flavor of the pasta is distinct from the flavor of the sauce and not salting the pasta blands out those flavors rather than making your sauce taste different (which, depending on your sauce, may actually be what you want to do).

xp Well, whatever that taste level is for you, although for anyone who's paying attention, the range where the various flavors are the most brought out and/or balanced is maybe not a huge area but also takes some experience to hit in.

Well yes, Dan, I am assuming that the flavor of the PASTA, itself, also benefits from being salted. Most things do, tbh, we just don't know it because we don't recognize unless we can "taste" the salt!

Btw, Americans aren't overconsuming salt because they're cooking at home so widely and having involved arguments about whether to add salt to their food before tasting it -- no, they're overconsuming becuase it's over-used in every processed food ever, to the point where you can't even TASTE it because it's substituting for real flavor.

fwiw the main reason yr supposed to salt pasta while cooking is to raise the boiling point of the water

haha that makes much more sense to me!

colligative properties yo

harold mcgee says it's for taste - http://www.chow.com/stories/10049

fwiw the main reason yr supposed to salt pasta while cooking is to raise the boiling point of the water

― GREAT JOB Mushroom head (gbx), Thursday, April 22, 2010 12:16 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah I'm pretty sure this doesn't actually work unless you use a LOT of salt (like I think basically it has to have like ocean-water levels of salinity, though I don't remember where I read that)

Laurel's right; you lose control of the flavor profile of your dish if you decide not to season a major element.

yeah, further reading would indicate that it DOES raise the boiling point just not significantly.

everyone says you should cook pasta quickly, so that makes sense, tho again I'm not 100% sure why.

Yay! I like it when I'm right.

guess I just like unseasoned pasta

yuck

that's what i always thought the reason for salting pasta was. (boiling)

xp
maybe yr right, yr name does mark you out as a food authority...

Also salting the water vs adding salt to already-boiled things: Always salt the water. That way the water is absorbed by the food during boiling, and the salt & other flavors (herbs, oils, whatever you put in there) are pulled into the middle of each piece.

Seasoning you add after cooking just sits on the surface.

I can't decide between sweet or salty and tbh, I think I like them both equally. Not too worried about salt because I have freakishly low blood pressure and have been advised that salting things is a good idea for me.

And I do salt my pasta water.

lol I salt my pasta water as well

Same here -- or else there's the alternative, if you're making sauce, which is that you wind up shooting for a sauce that goes a touch beyond tasting good on its own, and is flavorful enough to cover the pasta, too. (this is weird because with most sauces that's a given -- like a gravy or jus is obviously way more salty than -- but with a tomato sauce it's easy to forget it should maybe be, say, more spicy than seems right alone.)

sorry, a gravy or jus is obviously way more salty than anything you'd wanna eat on its own

which is not a criticism if you like drinking gravy, I mean, I understand

Salt the pasta water, check.
Salt the vegetable-blanching water, also check. (A blanched/steamed broccoli crown and some basmati rice are my go-to dinner when I can't be bothered to think of anything for dinner.)

dinner dinner dinner how many times can I put it in one sentence

got too much stuff on my plate right now, HAW

I salt everything. I love salt. Salt is the best.

I probably like salt the best too (I was eating potato chips at like 10 am this morning), but I had to give bitter some love.

i love my salt too. but my mom's recent stroke (caused by her blood pressure) has made me hella paranoid.

http://s7d5.scene7.com/is/image/PetsUnited/T651024_100314

Hamster loves salt lick

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/2752406269_faf33a02ea.jpg

Horse loves salt lick

http://bucketloader.com/myimages/DSCF0667%20jill%27s%20hsm%20salt%20lick%20copy.jpg

Boy loves salt lick

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_abrJlYnZL4k/R0qiHEeH6nI/AAAAAAAAATs/MaQJbxTbJqI/s400/salt+lick!.jpg

llama loves salt lick

http://www.whittlevalleypethotel.co.uk/USERIMAGES/Tiffin-and-Fudge-Salt-Lick.gif

Bunnies love salt lick

http://www.fatcow.com.au/odin/images/261410/Salt-Licks-for-Animals-by-Minrosa-261410-o.jpg

Cows love salt lick

http://idahoptv.org/dialogue4kids/season3/mt_goats/images/MTN_GOAT_2.jpg

Goat loves salt lick

http://cache2.asset-cache.net/xc/85592961.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=EDF6F2F4F969CEBD1A331AEDB2F385798BB55589D67F69E93C242E0D0FF8EC33

Sheet love salt lick

many cuet xps

really sorry to hear about yr mom's stroke, and bein hella paranoid is pretty good strategy, but srsly guys: salt is really low on the list of things giving you HTN.

the reason NaCl is associated with HTN is because retaining electrolytes ---> retaining fluid (water looooves charged molecules). retaining fluid can lead to hypervolemia (too much blood for yr tubes) which can lead to HTN. however, your kidneys are really, really, really good at regulating your daily salt load. that is: you excrete almost EXACTLY as much salt as you take in on a given day. eat a bag of potato chips and yr urine will be saltier than it is on a day that you only ate cucumbers. now, some ppl def have inherited "sodium avid" traits, so yeah, low-sodium is recommended. but really there are so many other things that contribute to most ppl's HTN that are less delicious so may as well axe them instead.

i think what's confusing is that high-sodium food is also very often high in fat (at least in the US), so there's overlap when you assess the risk. but hyperlipidemia (and atherosclerosis) are waaaay more dangerous than eating pretzels all day, so cut out cheeseburgers and milkshakes before you get rid of the salt shaker. also, stop smoking.

150 posts in and no one has mentioned the recent discovery of the sixth taste 'fat' http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2010/03/28/6622/if-you-can-taste-the-fat-you-dont-eat-so-much-of-it-/

I can taste fat, but it makes me love it all the more :/ (otoh, I think eating a lot of fat pegs my fat-tolerance meter pretty quickly, so maybe that tempers it...)

sour needs more love - I would use vietnamese dipping sauce for everything if I could.

for those who love salt I invite you to try some chinese 腊肉, a kind of cured ham that will surely dry out the entire insides of your digestive tract:

http://pork.twshops.com.tw/images/%E6%8B%8D%E8%B3%A3%E4%BD%BF%E7%94%A8-%E9%AB%98%E6%A2%81%E8%87%98%E8%82%892.jpg

None of the flavors work as well in isolation as they do in combination. I can't bring myself to vote for just one.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.