Flavour profile

A method of judging the flavour of foods by examination of a list of the separate factors into which the flavour can be analyzed, the so‐called character notes.

When defining a flavor profile, it is important to keep these eight elements in mind.

Umami

Temperature.

Sweet

Bitter

Salty

Sour

Texture

Spicy

Balancing flavour is both a science and an art, based on professional training, intuition and experience. Here’s an introduction to balancing the five key flavours in your cooking.

Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami are five taste elements that build our overall perception of flavour. When each element is perfectly balanced - not only on the plate, but across an entire meal - the dining experience is lifted above and beyond.

Flavour balance as a science

Understanding how flavours become balanced starts with knowing the basic rules behind preparing each element. Remember that adding salt to a dish does more than just making it salty - it enhances or counteracts other flavours within the dish.

These are the simple rules dictating how each element will affect the overall flavour:

The Flavor Profile of a Cuisine

If a cuisine is defined as the ingredients, equipment, style and methods of a particular geographic region, then a cuisine’s flavor profile is how those things are used to produce the dishes of that cuisine. For cuisine purists, it’s how they choose the elements that will go into a particular dish. But it also how locavores would construct a dish as well.

The Flavor Profile of a Dish

When you put food into your mouth, your tongue, your nose, your palette, and even your teeth register the sensations they receive. Your brain interprets the sensations and provides feedback based on your experience. Depending on your choice of ingredients (or more likely, whatever you happen to have in the pantry), you can wow people with your “Asian-inspired” or “Cajun-influenced” food.  By using your knowledge of ingredients and methods, you can fine-tune the dish you’re preparing, identify a missing ingredient, or take a dish in an entirely different and unexpected direction.

The Elements of a Flavor Profile

When defining a flavor profile, it is important to keep these eight elements in mind.

Umami

This is the newest taste. It’s technically how much glutamate our taste buds can tell is in a food item. If you’re wondering (I sure didn’t know), glutamates are an amino acid. In Japanese, umami means “pleasant savory taste,” and as a flavor, it falls somewhere between savory and salty.

When pairing it for balance or enhancement, you can treat it like salty food. The taste is known for being a bit elusive, but generally, umami tastes earthy and meaty. Umami includes things like mushrooms, beans, eggplants, or really savory meats.

Now, you know the five official tastes. And if you think about it, you’re probably not surprised—you could have guessed most of these. Except for maybe umami. But, before we talk about what to do with all of this knowledge, I’m going to add a few more aspects that are imperative to the flavor of a thing, even though they can’t scientifically be called “tastes.”

Meat, eggplant, mushrooms, beans, MSG
The degree to which glutamate is detectable in food. With no coherent definition in English, umami referes to the savoriness of a dish, using ingredients whose flavors are commonly described as earthy or meaty. This is the elusive “fifth taste” that registers on a person’s tongue. Technically, it is the detection of glutamates in food. Glutamates are an amino acid, the metabolic product of protein. And, if it hasn’t dawned on you yet, it is the ‘G’ in MSG – Monosodium Glutamate.

Temperature

Temperature of a dish is an imperative part of a flavor profile, I was a bit skeptical. How doesn’t that affect flavor? But, in reality, the temperature is a part of our eating experience, even if it’s as much about our expectations for it. Take potato salad, for instance. If you served warm potato salad in America, people would freak out. But, in Germany, the opposite is true. It absolutely must be served warm. Or, take the pizza. It should be the exact same flavor cold as hot, but it tastes different cold, right?

Fire, ice, liquid nitrogen, sous vide
Cooking, by its very definition, is the addition of heat to convert food physically and chemically in the pursuit of varying and improving the other elements of its profile. Throughout the world, cooks have harnessed heat in numerous ways in order to prepare food. Whether over open flames or through electrical induction, heat converts simple, raw ingredients into a limitless array of dishes. Conversely, chilling or freezing is the removal of heat from food. Aside from chilled dessert family of dishes, we tend to limit our use of cold for preservation and picnic salads.

Temperature is as much about the expectation as it is about the experience of hot or cold temperature. For a somewhat pedestrian example, consider potato salad. American cuisine demands that it be served cold, where German potato salad is served warm to hot. Hot American potato salad is not only distasteful, but could be potentially harmful, owing to the billowy clouds of mayonnaise. The same holds true within cuisines as well. Consider again potatoes, this time in Vichyssoise and Potage Parmentier. Essentially the same exact dish – potato leek soup – served at temperature extremes, provide completely opposite gustatory experiences.

Sweet

Sweetness balances everything. And everyone loves it. It’s the degree to which sugars are detectable in foods, specifically glucose, lactose, and fructose. We, as animals, are scientifically geared to recognize sugar as a good thing, but foods with sugar (before pre-packaged stuff and bread) contain high carbohydrates and nutrients—like fruit.
Adding a touch of sweetness to a dish adds interest. It also balances spicy and sour tastes. Sweet and sour chicken, anyone? Stevia, maple syrup, carrots, balsamic vinegar, and most fruit are good sweetening agents to add to your own cooking.

Sugar, honey, maple syrup, jaggery

The degree to which sugars are detectable in food. Sugar is by far our favorite flavor sensation. We eat entirely too much sweet food. Considering that refined sugar only entered the industrial age in the eighteenth century, it quickly became an integral part of cuisines throughout Europe. Prior to that, other means of sweetening foods were more common, including honey, palm sugar and date syrup. Sweet is the primary taste component in desserts, but is also frequently paired with sour and salty for contrasting flavors in savory dishes.

Bitter

This is everyone’s least favorite taste, and we usually try to avoid it. Initially, it was an evolutionary defense—bitter plants were often the species of plants that were poisonous. Actually, there are more proteins in our sensory cells that respond to bitter taste than any other taste (we’re really good at protecting ourselves.)

But now, in our modern world, we can pair it alongside the other tastes to add depth to flavor profiles. It’s a good counterpoint for sweet and savory foods. You can use foods like coffee, spinach, kale, grapefruit juice, beer, endives, dandelion greens, broccoli, or radicchio to achieve bitterness.

To balance the bitterness, which is the more common pursuit, use sweet, sour, and salty foods. For instance, naturally bitter greens taste divine with vinaigrette, and a dollop of Greek yogurt is the perfect addition to meat.

Fenugreek, turmeric, mustard, cocoa, coffee

Bitter flavors provide counterpoints to sweet and savory foods. Bitter is more of a sensation than a flavor description. It is detectable in coffee, mustard, cocoa, olives and citrus peel. We have a funny relationship with bitter. We enjoy it with other things. Coffee with cream and sugar, mustard with meat, cocoa with sugar and fat. By itself, not so much.

Salty

Strictly speaking, this is the level to which sodium is detectable in food. You know salty because you know salt. It’s the oldest flavoring agent in the world, and it is a huge enhancer of flavor profiles. In almost all situations, salty items solve problems with blandness.

Fair warning though. Salty agents brighten other tastes, but when they’re overused…you won’t be a happy camper. There’s nothing worse than an overly salted tongue.

Salt, soy sauce, red miso
The degree to which sodium is detectable in food. It is the oldest known flavoring agent in the world. Salt acts to enhance flavors in food by brightening the other flavors in the dish. We all know the taste of salty. The crunchy snack food industry is built on pushing the envelope of salty food. Lot’s wife was punished with salt because she betrayed her guests by requesting salt from her neighbors, alerting them to the presence of strangers. When used properly, salt is almost a background element, only noticed if it’s missing. Too much salt, and a dish can become unpalatable.

Sour

This is how much acid you can detect in food. Adding sourness to food will balance spicy and sweetness. It’s really good if you want to cut through rich foods, especially ones that are high in fat. Sour things are things like lemon juice, lime juice, orange juice, a lot of the vinegar (sherry, red, balsamic, apple cider), tomato paste, yogurt, and sour cream.

Citrus, vinegar, acid
The degree to which acid is detectable in food. Acidity is used to temper the richness of foods that are high in fat. It’s also very popular as a counterpoint to sweet flavors in numerous cuisines, as well as in sour candy. We have learned to harness and control the souring of food and convert it into foods like cheese, wine, pickles, and the like.

Texture

Creamy, flaky, chewy, rich, sticky, spongy, slimy, crunchy, cakey, dry, moist, fatty, gelatinous, granular, mushy, pulpy, tough…there are a LOT of textures. The texture is also known as a “mouthfeel,” which makes perfect sense to me. Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to textures in foods, but as a general rule, the key is variety. Try a little crunch amongst slimy noodles, or something creamy atop a chewy brownie.

Creamy, flaky, chewy, rich, sticky, crunchy, spongy, slimy

Also known as mouthfeel, this element is the sensory experience of food in your mouth. Eating the same thing over and over again can get boring quickly. With a variety of textures in a dish, especially contrasting ones, we can alternate between different textural sensations, enhancing the dining experience.

Spicy

The reason spiciness doesn’t qualify as a taste is because of the way we identify it in our food. In the case of the five tastes, our tongue has specific sensory cells that can detect them, and they have a specific nerve path. When things are spicy, we recognize it because it actually hurts our tongue. A pain signal is then sent to our brain by the nerves that transmit touch and temperature sensations.

That being said, spiciness is a wonderful tool in the kitchen, and it’s still part of what makes up our sense of flavor. Spicy things are easy to identify—hot sauces, wasabi, horseradish, jalapeños, arugula, raw radishes. They are often used as enhancers, but don’t worry too much. If you like it spicy, just make it spicy.

Cinnamon, black pepper, chili peppers, ginger

The degree to which capsaicin, piperine, or other spicy elements are detectable in food. Like salt and sugar, spicy ingredients are used to enhance the flavor of the other elements of a dish. The interaction of the spicy elements on the tongue doesn’t affect the taste as much as it triggers pain nerves directly. When experienced in conjunction with taste, it has an amplifying effect.  The degree of spiciness is as much a personal preference as it is a profile element.

Not all food has to be spicy. In fact, a large part of it isn’t. But the experience that spicy foods provide is found in cuisines throughout the world. Pan-Asian, Indian and non-North American food is known for its kick from various types of hot peppers both fresh and dried. Many European cuisines employ heat-inducing ingredients such as black pepper, mustard and horseradish. North American cuisines, of course, use all of it.

The most successful dishes achieve a level of balance, with specific flavors carefully chosen for enhancement.

Here are the basic rules of taste balance, laid out.

Sweet balances sour. Sour balances sweet.

Sweet balances spice. Spice balances sweet.

Sour balances spice.

Sour balances bitter.

Salty/Umami balances bitter. Bitter balances salty/umami.

Using these rules, you can become quite the at-home sous chef. And if that’s all you’re looking for, you can stop reading now.

Taste is just a bunch of different sensations we experience.

When a taste bud comes in contact with a portion of food, a chemical substance is freed in the mouth and it heads to a sensory nerve cell. This cell is activated because the chemical substance alters specific proteins on the wall of the sensory cell. This change causes the sensory cell to send out messengers, which activates a chain of nerve cells and heads to our brain to tell us which flavor to experience.

But here’s the crazy part. Each taste bud has between 10 to 50 of those first sensory cells, and each of those cells has their own taste preferences. Scientists have determined that there are 10 levels of intensity for each sensory cell, meaning there are about 100,000 different possible flavors. Then, add in touch, temperature, and smell, which all affect our perception of flavor. Mind. Blown.

Our sensory cells are replaced every 2 weeks or so, but through our life, they slowly stop renewing. Older people have about 5,000 taste buds. An adult in his or her prime has around 10,000 taste buds in total. Most of our taste buds are centralized on the edges and the back of our tongue, but also can be found in the back of our throat, nasal cavity, epiglottis, and upper esophagus. In fact, infants have sensory cells on their hard palates, middle of the tongue, and their lips and cheeks.