Daily Dose of English 132
The Tastes
Daily Dose of English 132
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the tastes. The tastes. What do I mean by that? Well, everybody's heard of our senses, right? The five senses, which are, uh, taste or I'll say taste last touch, sight, smell, hearing, and taste, flavor, taste, whatever it's called. I don't remember the exact names of them, but those are, those are the senses that we have. You might sometimes hear people refer to the sixth sense, which is like when you can just tell something's wrong or like. it's in your gut or something like that. But that's not a real sense, that's more of an intuition. But within the senses, we actually have five different things that we can taste. most of our perception of different flavors comes from our sense of smell through our mouths and through the food, which is why when people had COVID, some of them lost their sense of actually of smell more than taste, not completely, but they were still able to taste things that were like salty or sweet, but not really anything else. They lost all of that subtlety. Right, so you can think of the taste and the, so your sense of taste and your smell as working together to create all of the flavors that we have. Right, so it's almost like if you think of colors on a screen, we only use red, green, and blue. No, RGB, yeah, red, green, blue. Yeah, yeah, we only use red, green, blue to create all the different colors. But with just red, green, blue, you can't really do that much. You can make lots of colors, but you also wanna have brightness. Brightness means that you can make all of these different colors on our screens. Because if you have no control of the brightness, you only have a certain limited number of colors you can make. And so it ends up being a little bit limited. Same sort of thing with tastes and smells. If you only have one of them, the other one kind of gets, it doesn't get worse, but it has less options, because we combine them a lot. Anyways, the five tastes that we have are salty, like I mentioned already, sweet, then we also have bitter, sour, and savory. Savory is sometimes called umami, I like that word better, and we'll talk about it in a second. So those are the five different tastes that we can taste. You can usually find something with all of them that is very strong in one of them, And these are just the five different chemicals that essentially that our tongues can taste, more or less. And we'll talk a little bit about that. It's really cool. So let's start with salty. That's the first one. And that's pretty obvious, right? Salt is salty. A lot of food has salt in it. And it's that taste of salt that we actually quite like because we do need some salt to survive. And so salt is found in really a lot of food. And one of the things that I think is interesting about saltiness is that it actually combines with everything really well and enhances it. It makes it stronger. So if you have something that is just, just sweet, pure sweetness, adding some salt actually will make it not taste salty, but taste more interesting and not necessarily more sweet, but better sweet. And so that's why a lot of ice cream or really any sweet treat has a little bit of salt in it. If you make a cake, you wanna put like just a bit of salt in there because it helps enhance that flavor without making it salty. However, don't put salt instead of something else because it's gonna taste terrible. Because things can totally get too salty or too sweet or too bitter. Um, and so that's saltiness. You can, you can try it by, by tasting salts, right? If you taste pure like table salt or sea salt, um, you can get a salty flavor. I recommend, uh, like a sea salt because like pure like table salt, which is like NACL, I think as the actual components of it. I don't like the taste as much. It's a bit more metallic. Um, it does taste salty, but I just think it's better to have, um, sea salt if you can find it or get it. Um, because it's also usually pretty cheap because it's salt. Um, a good like sea kosher salt is usually what I use for cooking. Oh, what I always use. Actually, I don't need to say usually it's always what I use. The second taste flavor, the second taste you can have is sweetness. Um, and a really good example of sweetness is sugar, right? If you taste sugar, it's sort of this blast of sweetness. And we also like sweetness as humans because our bodies do need a bit of the nutrients and things that come from sweet things and yada, yada, yada. And I don't really have a ton to say about sweetness or like about saltiness because it is something pretty common. It's in a lot of foods. Again, you can mix it really well with saltiness because it combines quite well. Usually not a ton, you don't wanna put a bunch in there, but it can be really good. And something interesting is that stevia or other like sugar replacements that taste sweet are actually not sweet themselves. Instead, these are some plants that essentially act like sweetness without being sweet necessarily, which might sound confusing, but it's, It's just the chemical that the plant has inside of it that makes the flavor happens to be shaped pretty similar to sweetnessness. And so when it hits your tongue, your tongue is like, oh, I know this, this is sweetness, right? But it's actually not, really. It's like if you... Oh, it's like, you know those like kids toys for like babies where they have, there's like a square thing, a circle thing, and like a triangle, and you have to like put the toys through the hole? It's like if you take the square and it fits into the circle, right? Because it's small enough. Yeah, it's not technically filling up the entire hole, but it is going through, right? That's sort of what's happening with this fake sweetness, which is why it tastes sweet, even though it's technically not. Um, the next flavor that I mentioned was bitterness. Bitterness is often considered an unpleasant flavor, but I think it's really quite nice, especially in beers. And I think that's the best example of bitterness that you can get is a, like a beer, like an IPA or a double IPA are usually very bitter. Hops, um, which is the plant that is used to make beer can be very, very bitter. Um, and there's a lot of other examples of bitterness, but I think that's the best example. What else might there be? Like some raw vegetables are often bitter. Um, and it's that almost like it feels a bit like aggressive on the tongue. It's almost, it's not quite metallic. Metallic to me is almost more, uh, salty, but it kind of feels like you're almost getting a kind of a bit of an attack or something like that. Um, or sharp. And so yeah, I definitely recommend a strong IPA beer. It's usually gonna be pretty bitter and that's a good way to taste it. The next one is sour, which is things that make your face wanna go like, whoa, right? And sourness is very important for food because it tastes really good. Things like lemons, limes, citrus fruits are very sour. Um, I think one of the best ways to get a good sour experience is a lime, the little green fruit. Um, and so, uh, yeah, that's a lime. Yeah. Um, and so try the little green fruit and that's going to be pretty, a quite sour burst. There's a little bit of sweetness in a lime as well, but it's mostly sourness. Um, oh, actually if you taste the outside of the lime, that's going to be pretty bitter usually. Um, like the white part. the white part of the skin is usually pretty bitter as well. But yeah, a good, like sourness is so important for a lot of foods. We get it from things like chi or from like yogurt, from citrus fruits. We get it from vinegar. Vinegar is so important. And so I definitely am a big fan of sour flavors. And so if you, yeah, if you wanna give a good sour thing a try, try a lime. And the last taste, which is possibly the most, the least understood, is called savory or umami. Umami is a Japanese word because they had sort of known about it longer than the West. And so we ended up using the word umami. And it's this, the flavor like of meat, of like savoriness, it almost fills up your mouth. A lot of things have umami in them, but they're also mixed with other flavors. So tomatoes have umami, meat has umami, but we usually mix those with things like sweetness or saltiness. And so it's hard to notice what umami is. Soy sauce is umami and saltiness. That's a good thing to try. But if you can, try to find miso paste. Miso paste is very, very umami flavored. Tastes a lot like umami, rather, is a better way to say that. And it tastes quite similar to soy sauce, but without the saltiness. One of my favorite things to make is miso pasta, which is basically just pasta, which is boiled and then mixed with miso paste, butter, and then Parmesan cheese, because you get saltiness from the miso paste. uh from the parmesan you get a sort of a a bit of acidity from like the cheese as well but not really any it's mostly saltiness and then umami from the uh from the ah i just said it the miso paste and it makes a really good uh like just simple pasta dish which you can make in like 15 minutes But yeah, so I'm actually out of time for today. This is going to be another slightly long episode, going along with yesterday's. But I hope that you enjoyed, and I wanna know down below, does your language have a name for all of these tastes? Or do you use other languages' words? Did you know about these tastes? What is your favorite taste of the five? I'm curious to know. But that's everything that I have for today. Thank you very much for being here and listening to my podcast and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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