The Profound Puzzle of Falling Out of Flavor

Dear Tamar:

Is it reasonable to think that I should be able to make food taste the way that it smells? Some examples: Thai curries (especially with holy basil when the aroma is so beautiful, much more beautiful than the first bite); infusions of herbs, as in a summer drink with mint or rosemary, Pho that smells like Pho but tastes like a simple broth even though I've added the ginger and the anise and the fish sauce and the little sliced rounds of fresh chili pepper...the list goes on. What am I shy with? What am I overlooking? Or perhaps I'm expecting too much?

-Falling Out of Flavor

Dear Falling Out of Flavor,

When we first started dating, my husband and I had a tendency to pose each other big questions disguised as hypothetical musings. (Really, they were proving grounds.) On our first date, we attempted to define “greed;” on our second, we argued over whether one can morally distinguish between theoretical and applied capitalism.

We disagreed about both—a promise of ongoing discourse. But we agreed about expectations. Expectations are the bugbear of human existence. The only fair way to deal, for example, with a friend who’s never “on time,” or a partner who reliably forgets appointments is to adjust expectations accordingly and thus avoid repeated angst.

Our views on greed and capitalism have converged somewhat. I’d begun to worry we agreed about too much. But, you pose a provocative question about expectations. If a source as reliable as a food’s aroma makes a promise, is it unreasonable to expect flavor to keep it? If flavor doesn’t—and doesn’t again, and again—does the responsibility for disappointment revert to you? Should you treat smell like a habitually tardy friend and stop expecting it to mean what it says?

The answer is, as is so often the case, is that the change must come from within you. A brilliant recent book called Flavorama, by chemist Dr. Arielle Johnson, puts the relationship between smell and taste as clearly as I’ve read it:

“Tastes are the foundation and primary structural elements of a stone building, like a cathedral. Nothing stands up, flavor-wise, without them.

Smells are the stained glass—detailed, complex, varied, even narrative…If smell is baroque counterpoint, Vivaldi at his most ambitious and unhinged, Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations at the height of his talent…taste is a single-melody Gregorian chant. Beautiful in its simplicity, but leaving nowhere to hide errors or missteps.”

Flavor, as Johnson explains, is taste plus smell, with more than half made of the latter. Much of what we perceive as taste is actually retronasal olfaction—smells entering our noses through our mouths. There are only five different taste receptors¹; there are over four hundred for smell.

What does all of this mean for you and your curries? It means that at least one, and perhaps two, of two things are happening.

1. There’s likely a flaw in the primary structural elements of your cathedral—to use Johnson’s words. I suspect inadequate salt. As she writes: “Saltiness makes other flavors taste more intense, focused, and balanced while suppressing bitterness.” Salt is often a precondition for tasting anything at all. When you’ve seasoned appropriately with salt, the flavor you experience upon sampling isn’t “salty,” but the combination of simple tastes and subtle smells—both direct and retronasal—that constitute flavor. The “so beautiful” aroma of your basil-redolent Thai curry is destined to remain in the realm of volatile molecules unless you provide it the structural scaffolding it needs to cross into the realm of flavor.

2. Speaking of volatile molecules, you may be hoisting yourself by your own petard. I didn’t think of this until re-reading Johnson’s book. It’s possible to boil off the precise aroma molecules that waft into your nostrils so tantalizingly as you combine ingredients—the very ones that make a promise. These molecules are, as I mentioned above, essential. As an example in Flavorama, Johnson cites lemon juice. Lemon juice should be added at the end of cooking. This isn’t because heat alters lemon juice’s acidity, but because lemon juice’s aroma molecules boil off, leaving, as she puts it, “just the tastes of lemon juice alone, flavor minus smell.” I wonder if, in pursuit of the flavor you smell—but do not taste, for lack of supporting salt—you have sometimes tried to eek flavor out of your delightfully aromatic dishes by cooking them for too long; in that case, it may have been your (well-intentioned) pursuit of flavor that banished it.

Dear cook, it’s not unreasonable for you to take aroma at its word. But, if any of my suspicions are correct, you must do your part. Season with salt, by hand, tasting throughout, until the curry or Pho tastes like it smells. Keep the Thai credo of “hot, sour, salty, sweet” in mind as you do: if, as you season and taste, a dish tips toward salty, add a dash of acid to set it back in balance. Resist the temptation to wring the flavor out of what you’re cooking; you may be working at counter-purposes with yourself. Stay in vivid discourse with what you make and with whom you love, staving off any possibility of either falling our of flavor.

1. This is also a footnote in Flavorama. There are five tastes, but “salty” has a “salty A” and “salty B.” Our tongues send a slightly different signal when food is way too salty. That “too salty” taste (“salty B”) is only activated if you’re, like, swilling ocean water or chugging fish sauce.