NailBat
Well-Known Member
TLDR Version: Bitter is an undervalued flavor, and plays a much bigger part in making food taste good than it gets credit for.
Overly long version:
So apparently, the powers that be want more threads, so here you go.
I want to talk a bit about perhaps the most unappreciated flavor: bitter. It rarely gets the spotlight, you'll never hear anyone raving about the bitter flavors in a dish. If it is talked about, its often in the context of avoiding it. That's a shame, because bitter has been thanklessly making your food taste better in ways it rarely gets credit for. And if you don't believe me, consider this: can it really be a coincidence that one of the most popular beverages in human history, beer, is mostly bitter? Not to mention dark chocolate, coffee, and tea.
We are extremely sensitive to the bitter taste, as its purpose is to detect poisons. Even a little bitterness can overwhelm all other flavors, which is why it gets such a bad rap. In the right amounts, however, bitter can take a dish to the next level. How? Through it's ability to balance richness.
I don't entirely like the word "balance" when it comes to flavor. A scale with nothing on it is balanced, and so is a scale with the same weight on both sides, and a scale with some helium balloons tied to one end and the right amount of weight on the other. "Balance" doesn't really get across what bitter is actually doing for the flavor of a dish.
We usually think of richness as something we want. Rich foods are decadent and delicious! However, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. You become overstimulated, and each bite becomes less and less enjoyable, until you're just over it. That's where bitter comes in: it can cancel out the taste of richness, erasing it from your palate. Then, the next bite of the rich flavors becomes all the more enjoyable.
A direct example of this is a very sweet donut and black coffee. The donut is very rich, you can't deny that it tastes good, but its flavor is very strong. Then you sip some coffee, and that overly sweet taste is balanced out. But then the opposite happens, you'll crave sweetness to balance out the bitter of the coffee. And so the cycle continues, until you run out of donuts or you find out who killed Laura Palmer.
In savory foods, this idea works at a smaller scale. The bitter elements in a savory dish will often come from vegetables. They shouldn't be overwhelmingly bitter, but they'll have just enough bitterness to play nicely with the deep and rich flavors in the rest of the dish.
Overly long version:
So apparently, the powers that be want more threads, so here you go.
I want to talk a bit about perhaps the most unappreciated flavor: bitter. It rarely gets the spotlight, you'll never hear anyone raving about the bitter flavors in a dish. If it is talked about, its often in the context of avoiding it. That's a shame, because bitter has been thanklessly making your food taste better in ways it rarely gets credit for. And if you don't believe me, consider this: can it really be a coincidence that one of the most popular beverages in human history, beer, is mostly bitter? Not to mention dark chocolate, coffee, and tea.
We are extremely sensitive to the bitter taste, as its purpose is to detect poisons. Even a little bitterness can overwhelm all other flavors, which is why it gets such a bad rap. In the right amounts, however, bitter can take a dish to the next level. How? Through it's ability to balance richness.
I don't entirely like the word "balance" when it comes to flavor. A scale with nothing on it is balanced, and so is a scale with the same weight on both sides, and a scale with some helium balloons tied to one end and the right amount of weight on the other. "Balance" doesn't really get across what bitter is actually doing for the flavor of a dish.
We usually think of richness as something we want. Rich foods are decadent and delicious! However, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. You become overstimulated, and each bite becomes less and less enjoyable, until you're just over it. That's where bitter comes in: it can cancel out the taste of richness, erasing it from your palate. Then, the next bite of the rich flavors becomes all the more enjoyable.
A direct example of this is a very sweet donut and black coffee. The donut is very rich, you can't deny that it tastes good, but its flavor is very strong. Then you sip some coffee, and that overly sweet taste is balanced out. But then the opposite happens, you'll crave sweetness to balance out the bitter of the coffee. And so the cycle continues, until you run out of donuts or you find out who killed Laura Palmer.
In savory foods, this idea works at a smaller scale. The bitter elements in a savory dish will often come from vegetables. They shouldn't be overwhelmingly bitter, but they'll have just enough bitterness to play nicely with the deep and rich flavors in the rest of the dish.
