BONUS: Arielle Johnson talks Flavorama (Extended Interview)

41m · Good Food · 22 Mar 19:00

Life is driven by flavor. The seductress that is flavor often leads us down the rabbit hole of food studies. If you run a restaurant or you're in the food business, you know that flavor is power and it needs to hit in the first few bites. But what exactly is flavor? And how do we create it in our own heads? We've been following the interests ofArielle Johnsonfor years. Her new book isFlavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor.

Evan Kleiman: When I hear the term "flavor scientist," my mind goes to the industrialized food world. I think of someone working for a big company, like Kraft or Kellogg, who's trying to create the next viral snack or food trend. But that is not what you do. How does your work differ from that of most other flavor scientists?

Arielle Johnson:Most food scientists and most flavor scientists are employed by large food companies, largely because that is who hires people like that and pays for the field to exist. I'm at a little bit of a right angle to what they do. [What I do] intersects in the chemistry and in the sensory science but I'm much more interested in understanding flavor as an everyday experience, as an expression of biology, culture and ecology, and as something to use in the kitchen. So I do apply it but in a different way than it is typically applied.

Are you often contacted by chefs who are trying to create something or push something further, and they need science to help them take a leap?

Often, they don't necessarily know what science they need but they know that I am good at solving problems using science. Often, a chef has been working in one direction or another, maybe trying to do a fermentation project or get a flavored ice to behave a certain way. When I can, which is a lot of the time, actually, I like to step in and try to cherry pick what area — is it biology? is it chemistry? is it molecules reacting? is it volatility or something like that? — and set them on the right path to get what they want.

That must be eminently satisfying.

Incredibly. That's my favorite thing.

What intrigues me about flavor is how personal it can be. I sat across from noted restaurant critic Jonathan Gold each week for a couple of decades, listening to him describe flavor. I would always ask myself, is that how I perceive what he's talking about? Often, in my own mind, it was no, I'm perceiving it differently but how interesting it is, what he's perceiving. Could you speak a little bit about that, the personal nature of flavor?

One of the things I find most exciting and attractive about flavor is that it sits at this intersection of the extremely concrete — it's based on molecules, which we can measure, real matter — and the personal. Flavor doesn't happen until you put something in your mouth and the signals get sent to your brain and then from there, all bets are off. But one important piece to the connection between flavor and the personal, is that flavor is not just taste, it is also smell.

Smell is a huge, essential part of flavor. Smell, more than any of our other senses, is deeply tied in a physical, neurological way to our emotions and memories. Once we gather smell molecules and build a smell signal and pass it to the rest of the brain, the first place that it goes is the limbic system in places like the amygdala, places where we keep our most emotional, personal memories and associations. So with smell, and therefore with flavor, we'll often have our personal history, our emotional reaction to it, come up before we can even recognize or articulate what it is that we are smelling and tasting.

Chefs and restaurants around the globe enlist the help of flavor scientist Arielle Johnson to give them a leg up on deliciousness. Photo by Nicholas Coleman.

It's so interesting to me that these days, on social media in particular, where people are constantly giving their takes on whatever they're eating or the latest restaurant thing, it's always within these parameters of better or worse. Yet I think very few of us have spent the time to actually parse what it is we like and why.

I think that's true. I think science really has nothing to say about questions of aesthetics and taste — taste in the philosophical sense, not the physiological sense. What is the ultimate? What is the best? These are subjective questions. Science can enhance that understanding but can't really tell us what it is.

Let's get into the science. What is flavor?

Flavor is a composite sense, combining mostly taste and smell, as well as some information from all the other senses but taste and smell are the two big ones.

Taste, meaning sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, is something a lot of people know about but let's focus on smell. In the book, you say, "Right now, as you read this,you have brain cells dangling out of the bottom of your skull, exposed to the air inside your nose at all times, and we all walk around like this is totally normal."

I know that is how it works. I know it's a real thing. And still, every time I think about it, it blows my mind that that is how smell works. We have neurons that are attached on one end to a structure called the olfactory bulb in our brain and then those neurons, those brain cells, pass through small holes in the base of our skull and just kind of hang out, waiting to grab on to smell molecules on the inside of our nasal cavity.

Amazing. You compare smell to a QR code. What do you mean by that?

It's probably best understood by comparing it to taste. With taste, we have very distinct matches between specific molecules, specific receptors, and specific perceptions. When you taste something sour, acid molecules will go onto your tongue. They will interact with the sour receptor, which pretty much only interacts with them and with nothing else, and the signal that gets sent to your brain is like pressing a key on a piano. So sour, loud, and clear. Very simple, very one-directional.

With smell, we don't have a finite set of smells the way we do with taste. We have the five basic tastes. With smell, we have about 400 different types of receptors and the way that we collect smell information is rather than having these one-to-one pairings, like acid to sour receptor and sugar to sweet receptor, all volatile smell molecules can interact with several of these 400 receptors. And any receptor might grab on to a few or dozens of molecules in a different way.

You have some rules for flavor that you list in the book. I think the one that is the most useful for home cooks is the fact that flavor follows predictable patterns, and that if people understand the patterns, they can unlock the ability to improvise. Is it possible to train your palate to become attuned to that?

Absolutely. A lot of people when I'm talking to them and they hear that I study flavor, they're like, "Oh, I have such a bad palate. I could never do that." The fact is that most humans are very, very good at distinguishing differences between flavors, we're just very bad at naming them. Fortunately, we can learn how to do that with practice. Most of us are just out of practice. I've actually, in my academic career back in the day, trained a few dozen people to become very precise analytical tasters. What we do in the lab, you can essentially replicate on a simpler level at home. It's really just a process of smelling and tasting things very carefully, paying attention, trying to name any associations that you have, and then basically doing this over and over again. Most people are bad at it at first and it feels very out of our comfort zones and uncomfortable, but eventually, you will get very good at it.

Let's get into specific ingredients. What is meat?

Meat, from the perception of a flavor scientist, is a mostly flavorless but texturally interesting sponge of proteins soaked full of water with a relatively tiny amount of flavor-active molecules in it.

Those flavor molecules are like precursors and they create a meaty flavor once that meat is cooked.

Yeah, so if you smell ground beef or taste beef tartare from a restaurant or a supplier that is reputable enough to give you raw meat, you'll notice it doesn't taste beefy like beef stew, necessarily, or like cooked meat. That beefy flavor really doesn't exist until you start heating up the meat and the different ions and enzymes and things like that interact with things like cell membrane lipids and free amino acids, stuff that's floating around. Once all these components meet and get shaken up in the heat, they'll make these very beefy flavored molecules. That is the flavor of meat that we know and love.

Objectively, do vegetables have more flavor than meat from a molecular standpoint?

Yes. In terms of raw product, vegetables have a lot more flavors than raw meat. Definitely.

Okay, spice. We're here in LA. You had a burrito for breakfast. Why do different versions of chilies hit differently?

In terms of spiciness, chilies have a very, very spicy molecule in them called capsaicin. The range of spicy in chilies is pretty much a one-to-one correspondence with the concentration of this molecule capsaicin that they make. The weird and fun thing about spicy is that it feels like a taste but it is not actually a taste because we do not sense it with our taste buds. We sense it with a pain receptor. Technically, spicy is a part of touch.

Wow, I love that. For some unknown reason, I have about two pounds of cocoa nibs in

The episode BONUS: Arielle Johnson talks Flavorama (Extended Interview) from the podcast Good Food has a duration of 41:34. It was first published 22 Mar 19:00. The cover art and the content belong to their respective owners.