My Advanced Placement Psychology teacher was one of those cool high school teachers that everybody loved. He was young, he coached a sports team and he frequently discussed his addiction to Xbox and his obsession with "Lost." Barb (an abbreviation of his last name) liked doing experiments with us in class, like one we did that showed the link between your senses of smell and taste. We were asked to taste different foods in three ways -- I remember the strawberry taste test best. First, we ate a strawberry while wearing nose plugs. Next, we ate a strawberry normally. Finally, we ate a strawberry after smelling a "related scent," which in this case was vanilla. The class almost unanimously agreed that the strawberry-ness we tasted increased with each round.
Barb's experiment was a delicious way to prove to us the power of smell. Our taste buds only detect base flavors of bitter, salty, sweet and sour. The first strawberry was sweet, but that's about it. The second strawberry tasted like a normal strawberry because we could "taste," meaning smell, the flavor profiles. About 70 to 75 percent of what we "taste" is actually based off of what we smell.
But all of this is basic olfactory science you learned in middle school. Things get more complicated when you consider the third round: Why does smelling vanilla intensify the flavor of a strawberry? In demonstrating the link between our olfactory receptors, our stored perceptions of certain smells and our sense of taste, Barb unknowingly introduced us to the latest restaurant trend: aroma dining.
Here's the short explanation for this new trend, as related to the strawberry experiment. Our brain associates vanilla with all things sweet -- it's a stored perception of a smell. By smelling vanilla before eating the strawberry, our brains were already tuned in to detecting sweet flavor notes. When we ate the berries, our brains combined the perception of vanilla with the sweet strawberry, which heightened the intensity of the sweet taste of the berry.
Chefs are trying to capture our perceptions of smells and their link to different foods by infusing scents into their menus and restaurants. Grant Achatz, the wunderkind chef of Alinea in Chicago, gave a presentation called "The Sixth Sense: The Power of Gastronomic Memory" at the 2009 Madrid Fusion, an annual culinary conference held in Spain. Achatz discussed his penchant for adding aromatic elements to his food, like placing a burnt cinnamon stick on a dish. The smell of the cinnamon can intensify a flavor profile in a dish in different ways; cinnamon can be spicy or sweet, depending on how it's used. Just the scent of cinnamon can make a dessert sweeter or a spicy dish spicier, even if cinnamon is not in the original dish.
A group of Israeli scientists are taking aroma dining to the next level. Professor Alexander Vainstein and his team at the Hebrew University's Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics have found a way to isolate the scents of flowers and insert them into different foods. The researchers began working with roses and carnations; they were able to isolate the genes responsible for the complex scent of the flowers and insert them into lemons. The lemons don't taste or smell like the flowers, but instead the scents shared by the two are intensified. Vainstein has done the same with yeast; by inserting a flower scent into a yeast cell, the researchers created new, natural scent compounds in foods like bread and wine that use yeast, which in turn changes the "taste" of the food.
If you combine the basic science I learned from Barb with the groundbreaking research of Vainstein and the culinary vision of chefs like Achatz, who knows what we will be "tasting" in the future? Rose-scented bread and carnation wine, anyone?
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Caryn Horowitz is a junior majoring in history. She can be reached at Caryn.Horowitz@tufts.edu.
