Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor > Status Update

Common Acids:
From Plants: citric, malic & tartaric acid. Named after citrus, apples & grapes (wine making) respectively. Malic and tartaric are about the same level of sour and slightly stronger than citric acid. Most fruits contain both citric & malic.
From Fermentation: lactic & acetic. Lactic bacteria are tough and versatile, operate in many conditions. Acetic bacteria are picker, ignoring sugar, desire alcohol.

The chemical family of acids have a backbone of carbon atoms studded with hydrogen (and a few oxygens thrown in). Their principal trait is that hydrogen atoms tend to break loose and trail off, like sequins coming off a dress. Acidity, quite simply, is loose hydrogen ions. The more loose hydrogen ions, the more acidic something is. Some taste buds have tiny donut-hole shaped pores for detecting loose hydrogen atoms.

Sour: the taste of acids, mostly made by plants or fermentation.
Sourness balances sweetness, bitterness and fattiness, and makes flavors seem brighter and livelier.
Sour enhances gentle saltiness and tames excessive saltiness.

Salty makes other flavors more intense/focused/balanced, while suppressing bitterness. Most flavor differences among salts are due to differences in shape and texture, as well as trace minerals.

Salt your dish early and often while cooking, not heavy-handed at the end. This gives the salt time to slowly absorb into the food and be evenly distributed.

Practice makes perfect. Simply testing & paying attention to lots of things will help develop your palate over time. You help it along by creating an environment of careful smelling, (lots), but you will need patience. It takes repetition, and that’s fine! If you don’t get oak now, you will in a hundred smells. It’s all fine; it’s a long game. Nobody is born with an incredible palate, we all have to earn it.

You don’t need to make up romantic word poetry just for extra points. Flavor is its own poetry! More language is useful if it helps YOU clarify, but for its own sake, it can muddy the definition of what you were intending to explain better.

When you’re trying to put a name to a flavor, you flip through (your memory catalogue of individual flavor experiences) like a graphic designer flipping through their Pantone to find the right color. But no one is born with this catalogue- you build it for yourself by paying attention and carefully considering flavors and smells.

On Smell:
-you can smell way more things than you can taste
-individual aroma molecules have multiple aroma qualities
-no aroma molecules are totally unique to one ingredient
-ingredients contain many different aroma molecules
-mixtures of aroma molecules reflect some of the aroma qualities of their components, as well as some qualities that only exist in the mixture (whole is greater than its sum)

It’s impossible to pin down single smell elements in isolation, the way you can with taste elements. At the most basic, molecular level, smells have multiple sensory qualities compounded together. The way we perceive them is more like seeing a face than tasting a taste- a highly organized mix of many features, which is impossible to break down into one descriptor but immediately recognizable as a (complex) whole.