Food is essential to life, and all animals eat to gain the necessary energy for survival. Since the dawn of agriculture, people have experimented with different foods’ potential and learned how to turn cooking into an art. The art of flavouring requires not just taste intuition, but an understanding of the chemistry of different foods and their complementary pairings.
Today, chemists and chefs experiment with flavour combinations to create unique taste profiles for your tongue. The human body experiences flavours by combining the senses of smell, taste and touch. Your tongue is covered in sensory cells, which are packed into groups called taste buds. These protrusions on the surface of the tongue are stimulated by five main types of food flavour: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. For a flavour to be processed, the food must be dissolved in water and come into contact with the taste buds. Food that has little or no water content relies on saliva
