Why can I cook well but not identify flavours? [duplicate]

I'd like to say I'm good at cooking. I understand each element of the cooking process well, I can imagine flavours and how ingredients will alter the flavour of a dish. I believe I can put together really flavourful meals and (not trying to humble brag here) receive a lot of compliments for my cooking. However, I would say I'm pretty bad at identifying flavours. If someone presents me with a dish and asks me to identify the ingredients, I can get a few of them but in general I miss a bunch.

Why would it be the case that, being able to understand how ingredients change a flavour, I cannot identify the ingredients that produced the flavour? That is to say, how can it come about that someone can be a competent cook yet not pick out flavours from a plate? And how can I improve this skill?

flavor food-science

Best Answer

Being able to identify flavours is, as you have described, a separate skill to being able to produce tasty food. Someone could have both skills, they could have the former without the latter (for example an expert taster employed by a food science factory), the latter without the former (like you), or neither.

Rough analogies could be in music, art or writing: most good musicians can produce beautiful music but only a few have perfect pitch, the ability to name a note from hearing it. Relative pitch (being able to identify the intervals between notes) is much more common but is still not necessary to produce music. An artist could produce a beautiful painting or sculpture without having the skill of identifying a type of paint or construction material by sight. A writer could be write excellent prose but wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you about parts of speech, or what feature of a particular sentence made it so good. These aren't exact analogies but hopefully they convey the broader point.

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How do I identify Flavours?

flavour, also spelled flavor, attribute of a substance that is produced by the senses of smell, taste, and touch and is perceived within the mouth. Tasting occurs chiefly on the tongue through the taste buds. The taste buds are stimulated by five fundamental taste sensations\u2014sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

How do I balance my cooking flavors?

Adding something sweet (such as a pinch of sugar) or sour (such as a splash of citrus juice or vinegar) may downplay the saltiness. If it's a soup or a stew, you can try to neutralize the flavor by adding water or unsalted stock, but keep in mind that this may also affect the consistency of the dish.

Can a machine taste?

Through the power of deep and machine learning, faster CPUs, and new types of sensors, computers can now see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and speak. All these senses take the form of some kind of sensor (like a camera) and some kind of mathematical algorithm, usually a supervised machine learning algorithm and a model.

How do Flavours work?

Flavor or flavour (see spelling differences) is the sensory impression of a food or other substance, and is determined mainly by the chemical senses of taste and smell. The "trigeminal senses", which detect chemical irritants in the mouth and throat, may also occasionally determine flavor.

Introduction To Flavor Structure, The F-STEP Curriculum, \u0026 How a Coconut Macroon Changed My Life

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Images: Markus Spiske, Nicola Barts, Michelle Leman, Nicola Barts