What Is Flavor?

by Chef Mark Davis

Eating is probably the most sensuous thing we do every day. After all, what other activity brings the five senses together at the same time? But while we pay a lot of attention to things like the brightness of an apple, how hard or soft it is, or the snap it makes when we bite into it, we’re most concerned with its flavor.

Use Your Tongue

Aren’t taste and flavor the same thing? Often we use these two words interchangeably, but there’s a huge difference. “Taste” refers only to the sensation that is experienced by taste buds in the mouth; flavor is the overall impact a food makes when taste and aroma are combined. To make this distinction clear, pinch your nose and take a bite of apple, followed by a bite of raw onion. They should taste about the same. But if you try them both without pinching your nose, the flavors won’t be at all similar (if you can even get the onion in your mouth!). The 10,000 taste buds in your mouth can only sense the four best-known basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. (There’s a fifth basic taste called umami, but it’s not quite relevant here.) These tastes are detected throughout the tongue’s surface and in the back of the throat. Both onions and apples have moderate sweetness with lower levels of sourness, so they taste the same when your brain doesn’t take aroma into consideration.

Humans are “pre-wired” to enjoy sweet items and salty ones. Note, for example, how babies and young children actively dislike foods that are sour or bitter. This preset helps protect us from ingesting toxins and poisons (which tend to be bitter or sour). But we eventually learn to enjoy everything from lemons to coffee, possibly because we have the most taste buds when we are younger than six years old.

Bring the Flavor

If we could only perceive the basic tastes, we would never get the delicious enjoyment we get from a fine wine or a perfectly grilled steak. The flavors of these and all other foods are largely dependent upon their aroma.

Aromas are detected by olfactory cells located high up in the nose. Scents that make their way up our nasal passages stimulate over 10 million receptors that can differentiate thousands of scents. These scents reach receptors both by being inhaled and by traveling up the passages from the back of the throat. Thus, gargling or slurping makes most aromas more volatile and can enhance our ability to perceive aromas in very low concentrations.

Where Flavor Comes From

On a basic level, flavor is the combination of taste and aroma. While nearly everyone can identify primary tastes and aromas, some people are born with a higher than average number of taste buds and olfactory cells, allowing them to detect the subtlest differences in flavor. Super tasters, as they’re called, may relish this ability when sampling gourmet chocolate, but it’s not always a desirable skill. Can you imagine tasting the most minor off notes or spoiled flavor in everything you ate?

Even average tasters can train themselves to detect as many as 100,000 different flavors. So taste, smell, gurgle, and slurp your way through your food the next time you eat and see how many flavors you can detect. Savor the good, spit out the bad, and enjoy the wide variety of flavors that surround us in our food.