I am not a foodie in the holiest sense of the word. I never knew foodie, the word, or the people, were nouns or a religion until I started this blog. When I meet friends I would rather talk about life, it's joys, it's pains, dissect it, chew it, get hysterical and finally try to digest it without getting constipated. But one day when I was bored enough I looked it up. And this is how a foodie is described on slashfood.com.....
A foodie is someone who has an ardent and refined interest in food.....to be a foodie is not only to like food, but to be interested in it..............Generally, you have to know what you like, why you like it, recognize why some foods are better than others.......
It's those first thirteen and last eight words that disturb me. Refined? Nor do I know why some food tastes better than others. All I know is that it tastes darn gooder . Apart from the fact that What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderful book about creeping into the heads of others, and looking at life through the windows of their eyes, it also gave some very educational passages on taste in one of its chapters. Suffice to say I now have educated tastebuds. This may sound redundant but I now know, with enough indignation, that the five known fundamental tastes in the human palate is salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami.
Umami is described so well here. "....is the proteiny, full bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. ....."Umami adds body...... If you add it to a soup it makes the soup seems like its thicker - it gives it a sensory heft. It turns the soup from water into a food." "
I've also learnt that " you can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high amplitude flavour like Coca Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private label colas that you get in the supermarket. "
The private label colas may be "kind of spiky", and you can usually pick out the tastes individually....like "a big fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything", or you may find yourself conscious of a clove note .... " a sensory attribute that you can single out and ultimately tire of." In other words it doesn't taste as smooth, as balanced and as gorgeous. As the real thing.
A passage in this book describes (positively) and quite sensually Heinz Ketchup. "It begins at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moves along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?"
In high amplitude food "all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt." You can't isolate them. It makes you wonder why it tastes so good. Because you can't isolate them.
You just know its better. Because it tastes darn gooder.
Sometimes I wonder if I've learnt anything.
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