Taste: Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey

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Taste

by Barb Stuckey

Whether it's a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup or a salted caramel coated in dark chocolate, you know when food tastes good--now here's the amazing story behind why you love some foods and can't tolerate others. Through fascinating stories from Barb Stuckey--a seasoned food developer to whom food companies turn for help in creating delicious new products--you'll learn how our five senses work together to form flavor perception and how the experience of food changes for people who have lost their sense of smell or taste. You'll learn why kids (and some adults) turn up their noses at Brussels sprouts, how salt makes grapefruit sweet, and why you drink your coffee black while your spouse loads it with cream and sugar. Eye-opening experiments allow you to discover your unique "taster type" and to learn why you react instinctively to certain foods. You'll improve your ability to discern flavors and devise taste combinations in your own kitchen for delectable results. What Harold McGee did for the science of cooking Barb Stuckey does for the science of eating in Taste--a calorie-free way to get more pleasure from every bite.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Author Biography

Barb Stuckey is a professional food developer who leads the marketing, food trend tracking, and consumer research functions at Mattson, North America's largest independent developer of new foods and beverages. She and her HyperTaster fiancé divide their time between San Francisco and Healdsburg, in Northern California's wine country.

Review

"A mouthwatering exploration of the science of taste ... Stuckey tantalizes readers with details about the intricacies of taste."-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Fascinating...A must for any food lover"-- "San Francisco Chronicle"
"Try following even a handful of these pointers and your enjoyment of food will increase markedly."-- "Chicago Tribune"
"When it comes to fulfilling food, quality can be a substitute for quantity if only we know how to appreciate it - a skill that can be developed by reading this fine book."-- "Financial Times"

Review Quote

When it comes to fulfilling food, quality can be a substitute for quantity if only we know how to appreciate it a skill that can be developed by reading this fine book.

Excerpt from Book

Introduction What Are You Missing? A humble tortilla chip changed my life. Most people who are obsessed with food have a different kind of epiphany. Their eye-opening, revelatory moments take place in storybook locations: a first taste of cheese made from unpasteurized milk in Aix-en-Provence. Or a fish, just plucked from the water and given a quick steam in banana leaves on a beach in Vietnam. Or a forkful of deconstructed gazpacho in Spain that made them understand--no, really understand the local fascination with chilled tomato soup. There''s always a moment, but mine was much less romantic and, instead of opening up a world of flavor, it taught me just how little I knew about how to taste food. My moment happened in a laboratory in Foster City, California, at the northern tip of Silicon Valley. In 20,000 square feet of stainless-steel lab bench tops with overhead fluorescent lighting, surrounded by homogenizers, colloid mills, dough sheeters, impingement ovens, pH meters, and tube-in-tube heat exchangers, I encountered a tortilla chip that would change my life. I had just arrived at Mattson, the food development company where I still work as a professional food inventor. Our founder, Pete Mattson, had asked me to help with a project for a snack food company. Like many other companies, this client had enlisted our services to help it develop a new product. Our team had been tweaking the client''s formula for a tortilla chip that would be sold in grocery stores. To me, there didn''t seem to be much room for creativity: tortilla chips are little more than cornmeal, salt, and some kind of fat. I mean, come on. How hard coult it be? One morning as I arrived at the office one of our food technologists called me into the food lab. "Barb," she asked, "can you come taste tortilla chips?" It was 8:30 a.m. It would take a couple of years before I''d get used to bizarre requests like this at inopportune times--a unique benefit of my job as a food developer. Could I taste frozen garlic puree at 10:00 a.m.' Could I taste meat lovers'' pizza right after lunch? And would I mind a quick spot of oatmeal before heading out to happy hour? Yet the discussion that day was revelatory. My new colleagues debated the tortilla chip prototype, and as I listened, it seemed as if they were speaking a different language--one that I knew existed, but didn''t understand. John wanted to add a touch of sugar to promote caramelization in the moisture-removal step. Teresa thought it needed a savory edge; she suggested adding autolyzed yeast extract. Pete, a self-professed saltaholic, wanted to add salt, applied topically with a bit of citric acid for zip, both ingredients ground into the finest particulate size we could achieve. Particulate? The discussion turned to whether the chips should have a fresh corn flavor or a more masa harina-like flavor. The choice would determine whether or not we''d soak the kernels in calcium oxide, a processing aid that gives the corn a distinctly tortilla-like flavor that''s different from the sweet flavor of corn on the cob. There was talk of using a coarser grind of milled cornmeal to affect the mouthfeel. I''d never heard the word mouthfeel. Other terms like up-front and finish were used in ways that were unfamiliar to me and I learned new ones like rheology, mouth-melt, lubricity, and tannin. All this from three different chips fried at three different temperatures. I tasted them, but couldn''t tell much of a difference between them, and so I just listened as my more experienced colleagues dissected each chip, verbalizing the nuances as if each was as distinct from each other as a slice of bread, an apple, and a chicken wing. I wondered what I was missing. Clearly, we''d all been sampling the same chips. Why were they able to identify so many more tastes, flavors, textures, and aromas than I was? Were they just better tasters than I was? Did they have better genes? Or was it training? Practice? Experience? This was my moment, my revelation: the tortilla chip showed me that I had no clue what was happening when I tasted food. Later, after five or six years of working with our chefs and food technologists, I began to trust my palate and became less terrified of voicing my opinions as I tasted prototypes alongside them. I had learned the science of taste by being thrown into the frying pan of food development, shaken around for a few months, then tossed into the fire for a few more years of seasoning. Along the way, I picked up the language, a sort of Food Speak. I even surprised myself with a newfound skill: I could take one bite of a food, consider it for a millisecond, and know exactly what it was missing that would give it an optimal taste. For instance, I would know in less than a second if a sauce was missing acidity. More important, I knew what ingredient would give it the right type of needed sourness within the pH range we were targeting without overwhelming the other tastes and aromas. Years later, at a client meeting, I was giving a presentation to a group of marketers at a Fortune 500 food company, trying to convince them that a combination of tomato solids and enzyme-modified cheese would deliver high levels of a taste we refer to as umami, making the product I was advocating irresistibly delicious. I stopped, looked at my audience, and saw a roomful of blank stares. Umami, a taste we describe as savory, brothy, or meaty, is one of the five fundamental building blocks of flavor. Yet this group of food marketers had never even heard the term. They knew more about the tastes and aromas in wine than they knew about the tastes and aromas in food. This makes sense, though, because wine-tasting courses are common and there are hundreds of books on the fundamentals of tasting wine. Yet I''d never heard of a food-tasting course and there seemed to be no books on the subject. Why would this be? While only 34 percent of Americans drink wine, a full 100 percent of the human population eats food. After another decade in our food lab, my taste vision got sharper and sharper. I felt as if I could see flavors more clearly, hear food more crisply, and glean more detail from everything I put into my mouth. At that first tortilla chip tasting, I had not known that there could be so many facets to a mere snack chip, yet it turns out that every food has a level of fine detail that we normally take for granted: Chips. Bananas. Tomatoes. Everything. I began to apply what I knew about professional tasting at work to my dining life outside work. Eating became an experience of infinite complexity. I felt that I could suck more juice out of food, wring more pleasure out of meals. I was woozy with newfound power. My food priorities changed. I began to spend much more of my income on dining out, honing my new skills. From Just Eating to Tasting I used to review restaurants, and though I no longer do, I still go out of my way to eat great food, because I enjoy it and because it gives me critical insight into restaurant trends for my job as a "creative" in the field of food development. I''ve eaten in dozens of venerable Michelin Restaurant Guide-starred restaurants around the world, and dined at some of America''s top-rated tables. Cyrus restaurant in Healdsburg, California, is among the best. Getting to Cyrus isn''t easy. From San Francisco International Airport, you follow Highway 101 north for two hours, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the cow-pastured hills of Sonoma County. The drive requires commitment, especially on a Friday evening when commuters clog the long, narrow freeway on their way home to the idyllic serenity of California''s wine country, but a meal at Cyrus is unforgettable. Executive chef Douglas Keane and ma

Details ISBN1439190747 Author Barb Stuckey Short Title TASTE Language English ISBN-10 1439190747 ISBN-13 9781439190746 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 641.013 Publisher Atria Books Year 2013 Subtitle Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2013-03-26 NZ Release Date 2013-03-26 US Release Date 2013-03-26 UK Release Date 2013-03-26 Pages 368 Publication Date 2013-03-26 Imprint Atria Books Illustrations Charts; Line drawings, black and white; Illustrations, black and white Audience General

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TheNile_Item_ID:51534795;
  • Condition: Brand new
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-13: 9781439190746
  • Author: Barb Stuckey
  • Book Title: Taste

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