Tag Archives: principles of taste

Wine Food Pairing Guidelines: Taste is more important than flavor

01 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture

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wine and food pairingIn wine and food pairing, a lot of attention is given to flavor matching. We seek wines that match the flavor profile of the dish. Earthy wines go with earthy foods, herbaceous wines with a salad, wines with a briny flavor note go with seafood, etc. While this relationship is important to create that magical synergy that the best pairings have I think it’s a mistake to begin with this relationship. It’s seldom the case that your choice of wine will have a negative influence on your food. But it’s rather common for food to ruin the flavor of wine. And its taste, not flavor, that is the culprit in pairing disasters. In other words, the most important thing to know is how the presence of the 5 basic tastes in your dish will impact the wine.

Here are the basic relationships to know:

1. The most important factor to assess is how sweet your dish is. Sweet food will make your wine taste thin and sour. Serve a sweet sauce with a $150 Barolo and you might as well pour the wine down the drain. The wine must be sweeter than your food.

2. Foods with high acid (sour or tart foods) will make the wine taste sweeter and softer. Try tasting a bit of lemon with a wine to observe this effect. The sourness in the food seems to mask the sourness in the wine.

3. Salt also makes wine tastes softer and brings out fruit notes. Is there anything better than potato chips with sparkling wine?

4. Bitter foods will boost the bitterness and astringency of a wine, especially red wines with lots of tannins. Try walnuts with a young, tannic wine to observe this. Bitter foods are better served with white wines that lack tannins.

5. Umami can be tricky. Umami will boost every flavor. That can be good or bad. Umami can boost bitterness and acidity throwing the wine out of balance. It can make oaked wines taste too oaky. But umami also boosts umami. Foods full of umami can make an aged wine taste wonderful because aged wines have lots of umami.

Of course the amount and intensity of a taste and how dominant it is will be crucial information to think about.

This is obviously not all there is to wine pairing. Matching the weight of food and wine is important as well. But if you keep in mind these basic relationships you can avoid most pairing disasters.

Pairing Principles: At Last Some Empirical Confirmation

16 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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I’ve been intrigued by the question of whether there are principles that explain why certain flavors work well together while others don’t. Is it just a matter of historical accident that Italians are devoted to garlic, basil and tomatoes and the Chinese like soy sauce, ginger, and rice wine? Or can these canonical patterns be explained by more fundamental principles? Skeptical arguments opposed to the idea that culinary preparation is a genuine fine art often base their argument on the absence of such principles. But a new study casts doubt on that skepticism.

One popular hypothesis among chefs and food scientists is that ingredients that share flavor compounds are more likely to taste well together. Chocolate and blue cheese are alleged to share at least 73 flavor compounds suggesting that they ought to pair well together.

This new research published in Scientific Reports suggests that this hypothesis is true only in North American and Western European Cuisines. By contrast, East Asian and Southern European cuisines tend to use flavors that have distinctly different flavor compounds. In short, North American and Western European recipes depend on synergy with similar flavors enhancing each other, and Asian and Southern European cuisines depend on contrast.

The study analyses thousands of recipes by looking at the flavor molecules that explain the taste of each ingredient, allowing them to measure the degree of taste similarity between any two ingredients, and resulting in a “flavor network” which divides ingredients into flavor categories and shows their relative degrees of similarity.

The study further finds that the shared compound effect in North American/Western European cuisine is primarily the result of the use of milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream, and egg. In the Asian/Southern European cuisines, the use of beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken, and onion were responsible for the contrasting flavors. When these ingredients are statistically removed from consideration the effect of synergy and contrast largely disappears.

This study is a treasure-trove of information; it will take me some time to absorb it. But it strikes me that this is a landmark investigation. If there are indeed principles of culinary organization—analogous to what we fine in music theory for instance—this data should provide a foundation for their discovery.