Exploring Our Tongues pt. 1

I had been planning all week to do a salt tasting at our weekly public cupping last night, but then, on the way to work yesterday I heard a segment on NPR. It was about how a chef discovered the 5th taste sensation at about the same time as the Japanese chemist who got the credit and named it “umami”. The message I took away from it was about how creativity can beat out science, but science usually gets the cred.. It also made me think, “Why limit the tasting to just salt, let’s taste all the tastes”. So, after several hours of research and a small paper, I decided to turn it into a series, “Exploring Our Tongues”. Last night’s installment was “pt. 1, The Overview: Understanding What Taste Is and Our Basic Taste”

We started with a small discussion of the things that I learned..

The tongue is a large bundle of skeletal muscles on the floor of the mouth that manipulates food for chewing and swallowing. It is the primary organ of taste.

Humans detect taste with taste receptor cells. These are clustered in taste buds. Each taste bud has a pore that opens out to the surface of the tongue enabling the molecules and ions of chewed food to enter into the receptor cells.

A single taste bud contains 50–100 taste cells representing all 5-taste sensations (so the classic textbook pictures showing separate taste areas on the tongue are wrong).

There are five primary taste sensations:
~ Salty
~ Sweet
~ Bitter
~Sour
~ Umami

The receptors for salty and sour are ion channels. The receptors for bitter, sweet and umami are G protein coupled receptors.

~ Saltiness is a taste produced by the presence of sodium chloride (and to a lesser degree other salts). The sodium (Na+) ions in salt pass directly through the ion channels in the tongue and send the message to the brain of saltiness.

~ Sourness is the taste that detects acidity. The mechanism for detecting sour taste is similar to that which detects salt taste. Hydrogen ion channels detect the concentration of hydronium ions (H3O+ ions) that are formed from acids and water.

~ Sweetness is produced by the presence of sugars, some proteins and a few other substances. Sweetness is often connected to aldehydes and ketones, which contain a carbonyl group. Sweetness is detected by a variety of G protein coupled receptors coupled to the G protein gustducin found on the taste buds. At least two different variants of the “sweetness receptors” need to be activated for the brain to register sweetness.

~ The bitter taste is perceived by many to be unpleasant, sharp, or disagreeable. Evolutionary biologists have suggested that a distaste for bitter substances may have evolved as a defense mechanism against accidental poisoning. Bitterness is connected to basicity.

~ Savouriness is the name for the taste sensation produced by compounds such as glutamate. They are commonly found in fermented and aged foods. In English, it is sometimes described as “meaty” or “savory”. In Japanese, the term umami is used for this taste sensation, whose characters literally mean “delicious flavor.” Umami is now the commonly used term by taste scientists. The same taste is referred to as xi_nwèi in Chinese cooking. Savory is considered a fundamental taste in Chinese and Japanese cooking, but is not discussed as much in Western cuisine.

The tongue can also feel other sensations, not usually called tastes.
~Temperature
~Coolness (a.k.a. freshness, mintiness)
~Spiciness or Hotness
~Numbness
~Astringency
~ Metallic

We went through and tasted a very strong simple syrup for sweetness and an extremely strong salt water for saltiness. Since I could not find the pure components for the rest of the taste sensations we tasted 2 different things to get a feel for the sensation. So, on the table was lemon juice and a sample of plain yogurt for sour, 100% cacao unsweetened chocolate and a swig of tonic for bitter, and finally fish oil and parmigiano reggiano (the undisputed king of cheeses) for umami.

It was crazy.  Most of the things on the table were horrible and I wanted them out of my mouth, especially the salt water and the fish oil.

The table is set. thanks again, curt!

Fun Tongue Facts

The tongue is often cited as the “strongest muscle in the body,” a claim that does not correspond to any conventional definition of strength.

Chinese Medicine says that the tongue has many connections to the body, both to meridians and internal organs. It can present strong visual indicators of a person’s overall harmony or disharmony.

The tongue is also one of the more common parts of the human anatomy to be subject to piercing.

Sticking your tongue out is an international emotional gesture used primarily by children, or by adults behaving (deliberately or not) in a childish manner.

The tongue is also vital for blowing bubbles with bubble gum and whistling.

85% of the population can curl their tongue into a tube.

Don’t Forget the Tongue Twisters

A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk,
but the stump thunk the skunk stunk.

She sells seashells by the seashore.
The shells she sells are surely seashells.
So if she sells shells on the seashore,
I’m sure she sells seashore shells

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would
if a woodchuck could chuck wood.