How to Taste: Aroma and Scent

I've been cranking out the Restaurant and Eatery reviews recently so I thought I should ruminate on some culinary thoughts. Something I've begun to experience more recently is the affect of your olfactory to detect and sense taste. This is apparent in the film Ratatouille, where Remy immediately discovers his high sense of smell as the boon of his gastromonical adventures (and often misery). I've had the opportunity to finally experience this at two recent tastings at Silver Lake Wine and Funnel Mill. I shall blog these visits shortly, but to expand on this thought, let's first discover a few facts about our olfactories.

Humans have amazing olfaction abilities, able to smell 10,000 different odor molecules in parts often in the parts per million. That's a lot of smells. Scientists believe that our refined sense of smell came a an evolutionary result to detect delicious foods and stay away from dangerous foods. It's also one of the reasons why we can taste bitter things faster than sweet or salty. Bitter usually equates rotten and/or inedible. As true as the corollary of these reasonings may be, I'm a believer that you just can't reduce smells to evolutionary processes. In fact, I believe that our bodies were designed and created to smell in the detail and artistry that we can because smell is crucial to taste, and taste is the supreme delight of gastronomes.

It's well known that a nose-clogging cold can disrupt the appetite. Without our sense of smell, our ability to taste is about as lame as tireless jalopy. Smell carries our taste like Michelins a Maserati. That brings us to two things: how do we increase our ability to smell and how can we begin to distinguish (and therefore more fully enjoy) the scents in our food and drink?

My approach is two-fold: eat everything, in wide variation; set yourself up for the best possible taste experience for the type of food/drink you are consuming.

I've found that one good palate trainer is Scoops Ice Cream, where dozens of flavors pass through the gelato display every week, in notorious combinations (like bacon caramel and guinness tiramisu). However, these limit your olfactory because ice cream's redolence is nowhere near heated food. Wine and coffee is a standard choice, but these are more difficult to approach. Actually, the easiest approach is to go to your local Farmer's Market and Whole Foods. At both of these locations, you'll be able to smell and sample hundreds of various foods. Think the nut station at Whole Foods or the stone fruit counter at the Farmer's Market. Then move on to ethnic markets, where exotic ingredients like cherimoyas and durians are at your disposal (I do not recommending taking in wallops of smells from the latter).

Make a note of each smell, ponder its uniqueness, make mental notes of the smell and try to catalog it in your mind like a file shuffled away into your desk. Also, think of what these scents remind you of. Obvious ones are holidays, like the scents and smells of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Others are more easily related to ordinary life, like the grilling meat at a picnic, simmering soups in the fall, bright gardens in the spring.

Next comes approach. Stick it as close to your nose for maximum effectiveness. Disregard this maxim for peppers. But for nearly everything else it helps to get a FULL smell, like the sniff of a wine glass or a whiff of a cheese. Put that apple under your nostrils and marvel at its complexity. Put your face over that bowl of soup before you begin eating to savor the wafts of flavor rising above it. Then, while consuming, chew in such a way that allows the food to encompass your entire palate while the aromas flow through the back of your throat and into your nose. That sounds rather disgusting but it's actually the main reason why food tastes good if you can smell it (as opposed to when its clogged or when the food lacks aroma). Chew mindfully and you will notice a difference in how you taste.

There are other elements to enjoying food, but until then you can make like Remy and close your eyes while these scents bounce around like fireworks in your nose, on your palate, and in your mind.