Taste What You're Missing: The Passionate Eater's Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey

Author:Barb Stuckey [Stuckey, Barb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439190739
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Dilution Solution

In the case of some really intense foods, such as hot sauce, we take another step when tasting. To ensure we can evaluate the full spectrum of tastes and flavors, we dilute the food with water. Consider the hot sauce sriracha (known to its diehard fans as “rooster sauce” because of the iconic rooster on the label of the best-known brand). Its label is designed to look Asian, though it’s made in America, and it’s ubiquitous at Asian restaurants. This intense, bright red sauce is thick, vinegary, and dominated by a deliciously fresh chile top note. It’s also scorchingly hot. A tiny dot on your tongue will put your taste buds out of commission for a few minutes. To avoid this, we dilute a small amount of it in water and then taste the sriracha-flavored water. By doing this we can swish the sample around to experience all of the volatile aromatics. And because it’s less hot, we can take a second or third taste. Professionals who taste alcoholic spirits use this same method. Because the alcohol level of most spirits is so high, it’s arrived cN about a hard to distinguish subtle flavors, and it can be unpleasant to swish them around in your mouth—not to mention inebriating. By diluting spirits with water you can detect more than just the burn of the alcohol. True scotch aficionados will be likely to ask that you dilute their scotch with a bit of water, because they know how to get more flavor enjoyment from their drink of choice. This technique works even for foods you wouldn’t imagine diluting. Like chicken.

We at Mattson were working for a fast food restaurant chain whose research and development department had spent about six months developing their own twist on a very famous fried chicken sandwich. This famous fried chicken sandwich is, frankly, a work of art. It’s a boneless, skinless chicken breast, battered, then breaded with a simple blend of flour and spices. It’s fried to golden tenderness—not crispness—that results in a firm but juicy bite. Served on sweet, squishy white bread buns with dill pickles, the sandwich is a perfect balance of sweet, sour, salt, and umami. To me, it’s a crave-able, truly American indulgence right up there with apple pie, hot dogs, and bourbon-cornflake ice cream.

Our client’s goal was to develop something similar that they could offer in their restaurants for less money than the competition. They had been relatively successful in creating the sandwich, given the amount of time they’d put into the effort. Yet they were still about five percentage points away from parity preference, which is when consumers like both products the same. We use this as a measure of success when we’re trying to match, or reverse engineer, a food.

We frequently get requests from clients to “knock off Heinz ketchup” or “create an Oreo cookie clone.” Retail grocery stores, for example, might want to create a knockoff of a classic product so that they can sell it under their own store brand, usually at a lower cost.

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