Short piece by Chef Grant Achatz (Alinea) of what happened when he lost his sense of taste. Do YOU consciously smell your food before tasting it? Try it your next meal & report back to the blog how it informs you about food.
http://food.theatlantic.com/back-of-the-house/when-a-chef-cant-taste-his-food.php
most of the time when i get a meal or something new or differnt i always smell it first. most of the time i dont think about what im doing, but i do it anyways. but if i lost the ability to taste anything life for me would become a little more dull in the sence that i cant taste the difference in like somthing hot compaired to something sour.
ReplyDeleteWhat seems to be the most interesting to me is the fact that while he couldn't taste, his sense of smell was acute enough to allow him to continue developing new dishes. It makes you realize that taste is not necessarily as important as aroma, although both are nice to have. If his disease had worked the other way, no smell but the ability to taste, I don't know that he would have been able to continue. He would never have perceived the nuances of flavor that only your olfactory system can detect. His palette would have only been able to detect the absence or presence of sugars, salts, bitters, acids and umami.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I am about to eat i smell my food. I usually just do it without having any idea that I am doing it. But unlike the person in the blog, I dont think I can move on without having a sense of taste because to me all the joy is in the taste and flavor of the food.
ReplyDeleteWe tend to use certain senses more and since we do not need to use all of the sense for daily survival they do not seem as important. I can see how Chef Achatz was scared at first about his loss of taste, but I feel he adapted quite well by using other senses not damaged by his cancer treatments. This all goes back to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. If he just gave up or simply believed he could just rely on his fellow chefs’ palates his restaurant may have crashed and burned before his eyes. Instead he started relying on his other senses and the foundation he has built throughout his culinary career. Do you think when he worked at the French Laundry as a line cook, Thomas Keller just let him taste and plate only according to his tongue? Subconsciously we all use are senses daily but just don’t continuously rely on them to survive. I think this article should be eye opening to all us just started the CIA to leave with as much of a well rounded education as possible. We never know when we are not going to be able to use are culinary strengths and going to need to rely on other senses or skills to survive. (when I read this article I thought of the movie bloodsport when VanDamme loses his sight yet is still able to defeat his opponent and if you haven’t watched bloodsport then you need to step up your movie game…slackers!)
ReplyDeleteI thinks its almost instinctive to smell your food as it is pt on the table.... I believe that in Alinea part of one of the dishes presented is just a smell, a scent the is placed at the table before the meal is brought out
ReplyDeleteSmelling food before eating it enhances the experience in my opinion. Its like a trailer for a good movie. It allows you to get the general idea of the flavors before you put whatever your eating in your mouth.
ReplyDeleteI do consciously smell my food before I eat it. The last thing that I ate was a cup of noodles. The smell was deceiving but the taste was quite disappointing. I only ate it because I was hungry. Usually, I find that if I like the smell of a certain food then I like the taste of it. That is why I was so astonished about my cup of noodles.
ReplyDeleteWhether conscious or unconscious I too always smell food before eating it. Especially when faced with something unfamiliar. Sensing the aromatics seems to be the first point at which something becomes agreable or dissagreable. If a restaurant was filled foul aromas put off by the dishes it wouldn't really matter how good the food was no one would want to sit down to find out.
ReplyDeleteI had a roommate in college who would literally smell each individual bite of food before he would eat it. I never noticed until his own mother pointed it out to me, because his motion of doing it was so smooth. Unless you were actually looking for it, no would never be the wiser. This actually got me to try it a then, and I have tried it again since. I have to say it makes a huge difference in the way a food item tastes in your mouth. It seems to have a fuller flavor.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I try and smell whatever I am eating, before I eat it. While I may not regularly smell each and every bite, I smell the dish as a whole before hand. I think this prepares my sense of taste for what it is about to receive. This can be very deceiving, even disorienting with some food. Take durian fruit and Limburger cheese. We recently tried both of these items in product knowledge. I tried both with smelling first and then trying it without smelling. Smelling both of these first, I was not looking forward to what I was going to taste. The tastes though we neither pleasant or unpleasant, just kind of neutral. When I tried them each again without smelling, these were both pleasant. I think this says a lot with how smell often times preconceives us with what a taste is going to be.
I think I always subconsciously smelled my food prior to tasting it but it wasn't till after our in class gastronomy tasting when we plugged our nose and spoke about our smell as a part of our neurosensory system- it took something that always seemed kinda like common sense and put it into perspective. I now actively think about smelling my food prior to indulging. I think our sense of smell can also turn us off to certain foods as well though, sometimes once you "get over" the smell of somethings you can actually appreciate the taste. The only way to truly appreciate the cuisine is through the use of all your senses, and as Alice Waters would argue too, your brain as well. You get a more extensive appreciation for your food if you know where it is coming from and how it was raised.- kaitlynn b.
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