Taste Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good

"Foodies rejoice! Malcolm Gladwell's favorite food inventor offers a guide to the senses with advice on how to develop your palate and better enjoy the pleasures of eating. Featured by Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker magazine article about the quest to develop the perfect cookie, Barb Stuckey is the food developer that famed foodies--such as Michael Pollan--turn to when they need to understand the psychology and physiology of taste. In Taste What You're Missing, Stuckey shares her professional knowledge in an engaging style that's one part Mary Roach, two parts Oliver Sacks, and a dash of Anthony Bourdain for spice. Taste What You're Missing serves up stories: seared, sauced, and garnished with humor and insight into our complicated experiences with food. First explaining the building blocks of taste perception on a physical level, Stuckey walks readers through the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami. She explains the critical importance of smell and how the other senses--touch, hearing, and sight--come into play when we enthusiastically dive into a plate of food. She provides eye-opening and delicious anecdotes and exercises that readers can perform to learn, for example, their unique "taster type," or the subtle differences between sour, bitter, tannic, and astringent. Armed with this new knowledge, readers can improve their ability to discern flavors, detect ingredients, and devise new taste combinations in their own kitchens. Keeping in mind that the only thing foodies like better than eating food is talking about food, Taste What You're Missing gives such curious eaters, Food Network watchers, kitchen tinkerers, and armchair Top Chefs understanding and language that will impress their friends and families with insider knowledge about everything they eat"--

Listed under Cooking · Methods · Essays & Narratives · Professional