Section 1 - Summary
When one eats a meal, one may or may not like the overall taste of the meal, not because each dish tasted bad but because the dishes were simply not a “good combination”. Imagine eating bacon followed by a glass of water. You will be left dissatisfied with your meal because your palate would still feel greasy. However, say you have red wine and a steak for your meal. It is simply a great combination which leaves your palate and mind with a nice satisfied feeling at the end of your meal.
Of late, many surprising and unusual combinations such as chocolate and cauliflower and many others have been discovered by gastronomists, chefs, food engineers, food enthusiasts and the like. This, apart from traditional food combinations such as steak and red wine opens up a whole new world of flavours and possibly inter-cuisine pairings, a delight for foodies!
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For this, we need to understand the various components involved in food pairings which have been scientifically proven to influence our taste of food.
Tastes
It is obvious that a large part of tasting food involves well, its taste. It is the sensory impression one gets while eating, thanks to our taste buds. The five universally accepted basic tastes of food are - sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami (savoury).
Sweet : This taste is generally produced due to sugars and a few other substances such as, but not limited to, aldehydes and ketones. Taste detection thresholds for sweet substances are usually measured relative to sucrose, which has an index rating of 1.
Sour : Sourness is the taste that is acidic and is detected as the same by our taste buds. As is obvious, sourness is due to acids such as citric acid, hydrochloric acid, tartaric acid, etc. These are rated relative to hydrochloric acid, which has an index rating of 1 in terms of