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Barb Stuckey: Taste What You're Missing! *V*

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This is a Vintage Selection from 2012

The Conversation

The Restaurant Guys talk with Barb Stuckey, taste expert, about the difference between taste and flavor. They discuss why you need to contemplate what you eat and use all five senses when you taste. Hear about Barb’s UNfocus tasting group that tested how impairment impacts your perception of food.

The Inside Track

The Guys and Barb discuss analyzing food the way we dissect wine. 

Barb: We do a lot of critical tasting of wine, yet we don't necessarily do the same of food. I thought that that was pretty odd given that only about 35% of the population in America drinks wine, but a hundred percent of us eat food.

Francis: I would like to point out that that's our favorite 35%, but I get your point.

Barb Stuckey on The Restaurant Guys Podcast 2012

Bio

Barb Stuckey is a leading food developer, taste expert, and author of Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good. As Chief New Product Strategy Officer at Mattson (the largest independent food and beverage innovation company in North America) she’s spent over two decades helping create the products that shape how we eat.

Known as a “taste educator,” Stuckey translates the science of flavor into everyday language. Barb was instrumental in helping The San Francisco Cooking School integrate the science of taste into their curriculum by teaching the fundamentals of taste to each incoming class during the school’s 10 years in San Francisco. She spoke at the NextGen Restaurant Summit, gave a TED Talk on umami and has contributed articles about the food industry to Forbes.com.

Info

Barb’s book

Taste: Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good 

By Barb Stuckey

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Francis:

Hey there everybody, and welcome back. It's Mark France, the restaurant guys, and our guest today is Barbara Stuckey. She is a professional food developer. Uh, she is with Mattson North, America's largest independent developer of new foods, and she has written a book, it's called Taste What You're Missing by Barb Stuckey. Barb, welcome to the show.

Barbara:

Thanks for having me.

Francis:

Um, you are a food inventor.

Barbara:

That's right.

Francis:

Food's already been invented for, right?

Barbara:

Yes. We work for, um, for companies both large and small, some of the largest food companies in the world, restaurant chains, and then entrepreneurs who, um, want to get into the food business or in the case of the large companies want to get into new food businesses. And so we come up with the ideas and what opportunity they should be pursuing. Uh, what food format it should take, how they should market it. And then we do the prototyping here in our lab in Northern California, and we make the ideas come to life with edible prototypes.

Mark:

Barb, I want you, I want our listeners to know they don't think that we're doing something outside the box. You wrote an awesome book. Otherwise, with that particular resume, because you probably would not have been a guest on this, on this particular show, you deal in in an

Francis:

an area of the food world that's just. Something that we aren't concerned with. You know, we, we try, tend to stay away from processed foods and highly processed foods. Um, but there are a huge amount of the food that we eat and your experience, and I wanna talk about your experience because it has informed this really smart, really wonderful book that, uh, can help everyone appreciate the food that eat better. I mean, there were, there are things that I learned in reading the book that were fantastic. But tell us about, so you mostly you're dealing with in your professional life, processed foods, right?

Barbara:

Yes, I am. I, I think you could safely say that, but I also wanna remind you that some of the most famous, most delicious things in the world are processed. Cheese, for example, is processed wine is processed.

Speaker 3:

chocolate

Barbara:

is processed, coffee is processed.

Francis:

so it's

Barbara:

not necessarily a bad word.

Francis:

You know what? I would agree with all of those things, but, um. Pop-Tarts are also processed. And that's a little, and that's a, and that's in a different category of food. And I'm not saying don't ever eat a Pop-Tart. I'm saying that there's a, there's a distinction here what I was really amazed at is you talk in your book about some. You looked for a book to talk about taste. You looked for a book that you, you realized that you were talking to clients who really couldn't analyze tastes as well as you could, and this book is to help raise awareness overall. I mean, what, what led you to write this book? Realizing that most people don't understand what they're tasting.

Barbara:

That's primarily it. I mean, when I started 15 years ago in this, this world of food development, I was thrown into the lab here and, and our lab is staffed with 35 food technologists and eight chefs, and they were tasting foods in a way that I felt like I was unable to do. So there was something going on where they were able to get more sensory information from the food. When I use the word sensory, I mean. All five of the senses, how we experience food through all five of, of the senses, which is what I, I focus on in the book. So I started to think about, well, what is it that they're experiencing that I'm not, and why is the difference here? I mean, am I just not as well in doubted as they are in the tasting equipment department? Or it does it have to do with their training or their experience? And, and so I went out and I looked for a book that was just. Something that would explain for non-scientific people, which I am, uh, what is happening when you put food in your mouth and you chew and you swallow and you say you like some things and you hate others, like, what is going on? What is happening when we taste, and I wanted just a, you know, an easy reading book and I found that that book didn't exist. Mm-hmm. And so I decided I would write it.

Francis:

it's funny'cause you make some, uh, distinctions in, in your book when you were talking about your initial experience, realizing that people who are professionals in the industry, some of them don't have the, the vocabulary to understand. or understand the vocabulary to, to really analyze taste.

Mark:

and some of them talk on a level that, that the average lay person would never comprehend.

Francis:

Right. But, but we're not, when, when you, you talk about addressing a group of executives that, a, a client that had hired you and you said, you know, you realize that these, this group of food professionals who was selling foods knew more about the subtlety and complexity of wine than they did of food.

Barbara:

That's right. Well, and that makes sense, right? Because everybody's heard of wine tasting classes and wine comparisons and vertical tastings and horizontal tastings. We do a lot of critical tasting of wine, yet we don't necessarily do the same of food. Mm-hmm. And I, I thought that that was pretty. Odd given that only about 35% of the population in America drinks wine, but a hundred percent of us eat food. So

Francis:

I would like to point out, I would like to point out that that's our favorite 35%, but I get your point, but I get your point.

Barbara:

Mine too. I happen to be part of that 35%. But yeah, I, I wanted to really kind of give the same background, the same structure to someone who was interested in learning more about. The subtleties of taste in their food, and so I spend a lot of time in the book breaking it down into its very component parts, which is the first thing that they teach you when you start to taste wine. They'll teach you to look at the visual appearance of the wine. They'll teach you to smell the wine before you even taste it, and then they'll teach you to taste it and keep it in your mouth, swish, swallow, and breathe again. All of these are the same techniques that you should use when you're eating food, but we just don't approach food in the same way. And, and I really wanted to change this.

Francis:

Well, let now I couldn't agree more. And I think you say some things that are, are really reminiscent of, uh, another guest we have on the show in front of ours, Gail Green, who always equates sex and food, you know, as a, as using all the senses. And you, you do the same.

Barbara:

Absolutely. I mean, we take sex very seriously. I do as we should. I, I do as we should. And, and I'm gonna guess that when you are, um, engaged in the act that you're not doing something like watching TV or reading a magazine or driving. And yet we do all of these activities while we're eating. And so what it does is it distracts us from this incredibly sensual act of stimulating all five of our senses. So I, I just wish that we would take food more seriously and treat it more like sex. And if we did that, we'd get so much more pleasure out of it.

Mark:

And, and let's go back to the, to that wine analogy just for a minute. We don't drink wine to quench our thirst. Right. Okay. We eat food to to quell ourselves. To quell our hunger. Yeah. Okay. A lot of people eat food to quell their hunger, but if we took that the same amount of time that we took on tasting wine, because it's, it's something that we're not doing just to quench our thirst. If we did the same thing with food, if we didn't treat it as just something to sate our hunger, we could get a lot more enjoyment out of it.

Barbara:

Absolutely. And that is a really important distinction. I, I think that when you talk about eating critically and, and eating where it's not just to satisfy your hunger. Most people think about dining out in restaurants and find situations where you are. Paying very much attention to your food, but I am arguing that those other 99.9% of the occasions where you are eating at your desk or you're eating lunch at the office or you're eating breakfast at home or whatever, the, the occasion is that if you started to think about that occasion and that, that that ability and opportunity to suck more sensory pleasure out of your food, we might get more pleasure out of it, and as a result. Eat less of it and eat less of the crap that we eat in this country.

Francis:

You know? Let me ask you a question. I, I think this be, it begs an interesting question, do, because we, you know, there's this picture of a guy sitting on a couch watching a movie sort of mindlessly, you know, eating something out of a bag. Uh, do you think that, um. The, the culture that we have of constantly being entertained by either a television or a movie or the computer or at our desk while we're eating multitasking. Do you think that gives, um, some food makers who don't care so much about quality, do you think it makes it easier for them to pass off? Just the simplest, most garish flavors, you know, you gimme salt, gimme sweet, gimme crunchy, and you know, you don't have to pay much attention'cause the person who's eating, it's not paying that much attention.

Barbara:

You know, I think that's a really, really insightful thought. I, I've never really thought about that, but, but of course it's gotta be true. Um, yeah, I, I think if we were more discriminating in the foods that we choose and we had a little bit more education as to what a good. Clean, well balanced flavor was that we would reject a lot of the foods that are in the masses today. And you know, I I, I know this firsthand because I'm involved with large food companies and you know that there, there is certain customers that are just not discriminating about their food. Right. And that's a shame and I'd like to change that.

Mark:

Uh, Barbie, you use a word and you, you know, you talk about it a lot in the book, and Francis and I have been talking about it for 20 years. Uh, the word is balance. I, I mean, I remember early in our, in, in our years of running our restaurants, uh, talking to a chef and talking to him about, you know, making a dish better, fixing the dish. The dish wasn't quite right, and he said, oh, I'll just add some more butter. You know, I'll make it richer. I'll make it fattier. and Francis and I were like, no, that's not what this dish needs. Although if, if, if you're at home and you've just ruined the dish, throw a stick of butter in there and it'll probably be edible, you know? But, uh, we were like, no, that's, we're talking about making this dish more balanced. We're not talking about necessarily making this dish rich, dish palatable in some way. Yeah, exactly. We're, we're talking about making it balance and, and making it pop, and making, making all the flavors. Come out together and we talk about it in wine all the time. And, and I know we're gonna talk a lot about the how we treat wine versus how we treat food here, but we talk about it in wine all the time. We talk about balance and wine being the most important thing. It's the most important thing in food as well, isn't it?

Barbara:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I, I use this mnemonic device of, of a five pointed star. And at the tips of each of the points of the star are the five basic tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami or savory. And that when I first started. Learning the very basics of taste and, and I learned that there were only five things that we can detect using the sense of taste without help from any of the other senses. I realized that, wait a second, so I need to start thinking about these five tastes. And how they balance each other out, and that was really an aha to me. That's when I created the star. And now when I'm tasting food, I'm thinking, I'm going through my fingers, which also I happen to have five of those and I'm thinking is sweetness imbalance. Is the sourness imbalance? Is the salt imbalance? Is there bitterness here? Should it be here? Should it be higher? Should it be lower? And of course is the umami right for this dish? And then when you start thinking about things in that, you know that, that those terms. If you get those five basic tastes right and you get them in balance, everything else is really easy.

Francis:

You know, it's funny, you know, you're reminding me of, I've worked with young chefs in the past, and, and I, I, I'm thinking of one chef in particular who used to say to me, you know, every time I come down here, you're like, it needs olive oil, or it needs salt. I'm like, that's exactly correct. That's because every time you bring me a dish, you know, let's talk about, because you covered this in the book, but when, when there's sort of a level of when everything is in balance, it's good food. But when stuff really pops, you know, for me, very often I get a, I'll find professionals even, and certainly at home, they make great food, but they, they haven't salted it properly and salt is like, you know, a gram makes it all the difference in the world and they haven't. You know, and they haven't added the, I guess it's the umami that you get from, from the olive oil and the, and the bright aromas and the bitterness that comes from a, from a, a good sharp olive oil. Right. What makes it, what makes a flavor pop scientifically?

Barbara:

Well, there's a lot of things that make up flavor pop, but I think it, it goes back to balance. And I talked to a lot of chefs when I was writing this book. A lot of, um, very successful chefs in San Francisco, and I ask them the same question like, what makes food pop? And they think about taste and flavors a lot differently than I do, but it, it's sort of always kind of came back to these two things and that, and that was. Acid and salt. Acid and salt. And most foods, if you think about it, have at least some acid and at least some salt, and they sort of enhance each other and accentuate each other. But you can't stop there. You can't really just say that acid and salt make a food pop because we know that something that's plainly acidic or plainly salty or just acidic and salty. It doesn't necessarily pop in the right way in a, in a good way. It, it's the balance of the acidity and salt in relation to the other taste, the, the sweetness, the bitterness, and the umami. And I think that that thing, that, that makes it pop, that, that, that quintessential quality that is not. The same for every food. And so it's really, it's an, it's an almost itThe thing that it's like, you know, it's like the, uh. Supreme Court said about pornography, right?

Speaker 3:

You know what you say? I dunno what

Barbara:

it's, but I'll know it when I see it. Or in this case, I know it when I'll smell it and I'll know it when I taste it. And so you, you just have to have that sense of what that quality is. And that, I think comes from the ability and the understanding of balance.

Francis:

Mark and I do a lot of beverage teaching and beverage training, whether it's spirits or beer or wine, but certainly in wine. Um, there are things that we understand, and I don't know whether there, you know, are official distinctions that we've made in our mind, but the way that we understand tasting, the way that we in the wine community understand tasting wine, we always point to. The structure of a wine and then everything else. And so the structure of the wine is the acid in tannin or the acid in the bitterness, more or less sort of, we'll, we'll go with that for now. Um, is the acid in tannin of the wine and everything else sort of hangs on that structure, whether it's sweetness and sort of the interesting fruit flavors and all the bells and whistles that make it great,

Mark:

they become the

Francis:

artwork. And is, is there a similar thing in food? Is there a structure that we begin with and then we build a complexity on that structure?

Barbara:

Yes. And I think what I think that the, what you're talking about with wine, the structure, the acidity in the town, and, um, you're starting to, to, to talk about the, the senses and the taste. And so let's, let's talk about, first of all, the difference between taste and flavor. And, and then I'm, I'm gonna tie this all together, but the difference between taste and flavor is that taste. Is only five things. It's sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami. So if you're not experiencing one of those things, that's not taste, it's something else. What we use, what the word we use to describe flavor. This is, this flavor is the, the what we're usually talking about. When you say, I like the taste of something really you, you mean that I like the flavor of it. And flavor encompasses two other senses. Those senses are the sense of smell. Okay. And the sense of touch. And so when you talk about the structure of a wine, you're talking about the acid, which is one of the basic tastes. The tannin, which tannin sometimes goes along with bitter, but tannin is not bitterness, right? Tannin is actually a stringency or, or texture,

Speaker 3:

right?

Barbara:

And. Smell and aroma, and that smell is what comes through your nostrils when you stick your nose in the glass. But even more importantly, it's what comes from the back of your throat when you put the wine in your mouth and swish and swallow and the aromas go up through your nose. So there's a whole lot of stuff going on there, but, but essentially what we're talking about. With a wine that tastes good, is that it has the proper structure from the basic tastes of, usually those tastes are sweet and sour. Mm-hmm. Um, it has the proper textural component, which in the case of red wines is usually, uh, a nice balanced level of tannin. And then it has. The aromas, which come from the ripeness of the fruit and the type of varietal and whether or not you've aged in oak and whether or not you've manipulated the wine in some other way. And so those three senses together give you the flavor of wine. Now, if you switch over to food, it's exactly the same thing. Food has basic taste. They sort of give you the outline of the food and then what fills in the, the center and what really what, what makes it that artwork that you mentioned is the aromas and the texture. And that is, uh, a way that I hope to teach people to start thinking about food in terms of setting up the structure of the food with the basic tastes and filling it in with the textural components. And the aroma.

Mark:

Barb, we, a long time ago, Francis and I did, it, did this really cool seminar where we were comparing taste versus what you're actually smelling. Olfactory senses. Olfactory, whether,

Francis:

whether through your nose or what they call what you were describing earlier, the the retronasal o olfactory cements where you're basically smelling up through your sinuses, what's in your mouth. And I

Mark:

think every. Person in America knows about the five taste. on their tongue. but I think we don't really appreciate it. And you, you put a test in your book and, and Francis and I did this test years ago, and it was amazing to me what the test they gave you a nose clip and they put the nose clip on your, on your nose and they gave you something to taste. Yeah. And what we tasted it, it was very simple. It was obviously like a, a powdered sugar or something like that. That's, that's what it tastes like, just sugar. Okay. Literally, you take the thing off your nose as you're finishing swallowing what's in your mouth and you realize that it's cinnamon sugar. Right. And because we don't have the ability to perceive the smell of, of cinnamon without our nose, it's just sugar. It was just sugar. And and I think people don't realize how that, that this is real. This is, it's not like, oh, you only taste these things and you get some other flavors, but they're minimal. It is, I mean, it's, this is a hard and fast thing, isn't it?

Barbara:

It really is, and it sometimes takes doing that exercise to make a believer out of someone. I mean, even restaurateurs like yourself or chefs or food technologists or people that have been in the business for years, they take it so for granted because they have this instinctive or instinctual understanding of how flavors work, but they forget that taste is really simple. Taste is five things, right? And without your sense of smell, those five things can be pretty darn boring.

Mark:

Yeah. We think it's, really think we, we think we perceive more with our tongue than we do there.

Barbara:

And, and you know exactly. You, you of course know why the, you can understand why the, the confusion. It's because we put food. In our mouth. We don't put food in our nose. You know, hopefully, well

Francis:

Mark did when he was small. He used to piss his mother off the occasional pee. Hey, listen, Barb, we need to take a quick break. Welcome. Come back on the other side. We're talking with Barb Stuckey about her book. Taste What You're Missing and if you haven't read the book, you are missing. It's the Passionate Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good. You can find out more about it on our website, restaurant guys. radio.dot com. Don't go away. There's more. Hey everybody. Welcome back. It's Mark and Francis. Uh, Mark's actually putting some food in his nose right now. And our guest is, our guest is uh, I'm gonna put some food in your nose. That's why it's radio. You dunno, you don't know if I'm telling the truth or not. Um, uh, we're talking with Barb Stuckey about her book Taste. All sorts of fun facts in this book. Um, and before we get to the sum of the fun facts, I, I think you cover in the Science of Food and, you know, this is a science book written for the layman, which I is really fantastic. You know, you don't need to Well's good for Francis on our layman. So avoided science classes like, but you explain the scientific principles and you give evidence for what you say, right? So that's, that's part of what's going on in this book.

Barbara:

Yeah, I am really trying to appeal to someone who I call a curious eater.

Speaker 3:

Mm-hmm.

Barbara:

You don't have to be into science at all. In fact, I'm not that interested in science myself. Um, but I, I wanted to understand what was happening and to understand what's happening. When you put food in your mouth and you, you make a judgment. It really helps to understand the science that, that underlies it all. But I write, I basically tell stories mm-hmm. That that's what the book is about. And so I'm, I'm telling stories that illustrate the concepts and hopefully they're easy to, to digest. Um, well,

Francis:

and, and one of the things I like about the book is you tell stories, but you also back it up with, I mean, it's more the mechanics of taste as well. And then, you know, the stories illustrate that you talked to. Stories about people who are compromised in some way or have their tastes change. Talk to us about, I mean, you talk about people who take drugs or are high on drugs and how that affects their taste people, pregnant people, folks with Alzheimer's disease and what that does to their taste. Talk to us about that.

Barbara:

Well, yeah, I mean it one of the ways to really appreciate how much we get from our food. When it relates to a single sense is to talk to someone who doesn't have that sense. And so I went out and I talked to people who were deaf and people who were blind. And I ate in the dark and I ate without my hearing, and I ate with my hearing accentuated in an chamber. And every time I talked to people who were missing one of their senses, it to me, what it did is. It really just hammered home how, without one of our senses, the, our experience of food is incomplete. And, um, my favorite story from the book is it because everybody will know this brand, but um, it's about these two guys who set out to create. Some ice cream and they, they wanted to make a super premium ice cream that would be, um, widely appealing. And as they were developing the ice cream, one of the guys who happened to be lacking his sense of smell. And so of course that means he got a whole lot less flavor from the food he kept saying to the other guy. Add more stuff, add more chunks, add more swirls, add more nuts, because he was missing the sense of smell. He was trying to replace that sensory experience with another sense, which was the textural sense.

Mark:

But it worked.'cause I really liked the chunks and the swirls and the stuff like that in Harry and Tom's ice cream.

Francis:

There's a famous brand you haven't had, Harry and Tom's, it's amazing.

Barbara:

So yeah, exactly. Uh, but of course I'm talking about Ben and Jerry's. No. And, um, and it, it was Ben Cohen's a knowmia, which is the fancy word for a lack of sense of smell that ended up that that put them in this place. And I just feel like that's the kind of story that really illustrates to us how important. Every one of the senses are, and without one of them, your experience of food just changes. And, and that's one of the points I'm trying to make.

Francis:

And also you talk about though, how everyone's perception of food, even if they have all their senses, it's different and it can be altered by things that happen to you. So what, what happens to pregnant women in taste? We all have the, the, the stereotype in our head of the woman who, you know, has a craving, pickle, ice cream, pickles, and ice cream. What, what, what's happening when a woman gets pregnant? What happens to her sense of taste? Well, you wanna swirl

Mark:

those two together.

Francis:

That's

Mark:

right.

Barbara:

I'm sorry, Barb. Um, oh, that would be fun. Ice cream for Ben and Jerry's pickles and ice cream. I'm out pregnancy. I'm out

Francis:

all. I'm all out. Anyway. So what happens to pregnant women and how does it affect their taste?

Barbara:

Well, the, the problem with, um, testing women when they're pregnant is that we don't get a lot of access to women in their first trimester. And this is usually when we get the most complaints about, um, odd cravings or odd, um, sensory experiences. And of course, that's because people, many people don't know they're pregnant until the second or third month, and so you can't. Very well get them into a, a testing lab. Um, so we do, we don't have a lot of information on the first trimester in the second and third trimesters. We do have a little bit of scientific data, and to be quite honest, it doesn't show that there is that much of a difference in sense of smell then the people are normally experiencing. Um, it, it, it just hasn't been born out by the science. Of course, we've all heard the anecdotal stuff that, um, people. Crave odd things and people, people's sense of smell are, are much more, uh, acute when they're pregnant. Um, we, we just haven't been able to prove that very well. So there may be something else going on and it just may be an a heightened awareness. Of it that is somehow coming from the brain and not from the sense of smell, or not from the sense of taste. Uh, but you know, that we, we don't know a whole lot about what happens in the brain, but clearly something is happening that, that is not necessarily attributable to the sense of smell or taste.

Mark:

Well, Barb, I, I'll give you some more anecdotal stuff to look at.'cause my, my wife was pregnant, you know, four different times with each of our kids, and she craved different foods with each of our children. But I think something that. bears looking into what she craved with our final child wasn't salty or sweet or pickles or umami. She craved crunchy and she searched out things that were, were, were thick and crunchy, and she needed that texture to, to satisfy herself. That's so interesting. So it was really, it was really interesting to watch and I didn't spend any time studying at all. I gave her the crunchy thing. She wanted a crunchy thing. Alright,

Francis:

so let, let's talk about something. What happens when people are on drugs? You talk about in your book, when people are high on drugs, it affects their, their perception of food.

Barbara:

Well, yeah, I, I, I actually did a little bit of pseudoscience and the preparation for this book and, and we went out and, um, you know, bear in mind we're in Northern California here and, um, we did a little, what we call a lack of focus group. Uh, awesome. Where everybody welcome

Mark:

to, welcome to the dinner table with Francis and me. Yeah. Yeah.

Barbara:

So, um, we got everybody high on marijuana. And, um, the point was to try and prove whether I'm, I'm shocked, Barb. I'm

Francis:

shocked for any interview right now. Right now You're off the show. No, go ahead. Luckily you all had glaucoma, so it was okay.

Barbara:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

Wait, wait. It was, it was medicinal and it was cured after that

Francis:

dinner. Fantastic. Alright, so everybody got buzzed and, and before you devoured the 37 bags of potato chip afterwards, how did it change your perception of flavor?

Barbara:

Right. Well, so we did some testing before anybody could get their hands on anything inebriating, because we had to set a baseline,

Speaker 3:

right?

Barbara:

And then we got everybody high, and then we had them taste the same foods while they were high. And the point was to prove or disprove this myth that. You get the munchies and food just tastes so amazing when you're high. And it turns out that, um, there's been quite a bit of, uh, real science, not pseudoscience done, but there's been quite a bit of real science done, um, in this area of, of study. Um, and um, what we found in our little pseudoscience experiment was that when you're high, you get mostly. Basic tastes from your food and you're focused very much on the basic taste.

Speaker 3:

Mm-hmm. The

Barbara:

sweetness, the saltiness. And you seem to have a somewhat blurred or, or missing sense of, of clarity when it comes to textural components and aromas and, um, so things just become much simpler. When you're high at, at least that was from my own experience, uh,

Francis:

not that I've ever done this, but it, it seems a little simpler. Something like, if we pull that quote out of this show and kind of post it and post it as, as kind

Mark:

of the byline, you won't, you won't mind. I'd like it simpler when you're high. I'd like to sum it up as

Francis:

you've been in jury, say,

Speaker 3:

oh, good long.

Francis:

That's, it's the

Speaker 3:

best thing I've ever tasted. Exactly.

Francis:

It's on Chunking monkey. Hello. Sorry. Um, I agree with your findings, Dr. Stuckey. Um, so let's talk about, and please feel free to invite the restaurant guys to your next experiment. Um, our next experimental session, we'll come to California. Now, let's talk about other things though. a fun fact outta your book. Uh, noise can affect if there's loud noise in the background, it affects how you taste things. Is that correct? Yes. What's that all about?

Barbara:

Yeah. And, and I think the sense of, of hearing is probably the least appreciated when it comes to our, our experience of food. And, you know, usually when we talk about the sound of food, we're talking about music that's playing in the background of a restaurant, which in fact does have a, an effect on your experience. And I write about that as well. But what's more important and what's more interesting to me is what ambient noise can do in the background and what. The sound from the food, what the noise from the food can communicate to you. And so with regard to the first, uh, it, it turns out that, um, lu Danza, when the airline, when, when they're testing their foods for flight, they actually simulate the environment of a plane. So they have this. This grounded fuselage that they pipe in the sound from the jet engine and they dry the air out like you like it is when you're up in at 30,000 feet and they do all of these different things to simulate that environment. And one of the things that they've learned is that when you have those two jet engines blaring on the side of the fuselage, that that noise, just the fact that that loud noise is there, what you're gonna experience from the, the taste of the food is that they're going to be much. More muted. So we say that that, and

Francis:

if you're high at, and if you're high at the same time, it's just not, you know, it doesn't like anything at all. I'm sorry, go right ahead.

Barbara:

So, so what we take away from this experience is that really loud ambient sound in the background can have a masking effect on taste. Now we didn't, they, they didn't test flavors, so they didn't test necessarily texture, they didn't test aroma. But we can assume that. That that sound will have a similar masking effect, but, but let's take that

Mark:

to its next logical step, Barb. I mean, we are, as human beings, we're easily distracted. We talked about having the television on, we talked about all those, all those other things that prevent us from really tasting food. Now you've added noise, right? Well, you know, on some level we're paying attention to the noise, and that is distracting us from what we're eating. Right. We only have Absolutely. You only have so much bandwidth. Exactly.

Barbara:

That's exactly right, and I love that word distraction. I, I think that one of the simplest things that people can do, and everybody always asks me How can I be a better taster? The simplest thing you can do is pay attention.

Francis:

You, you know, focus, you talk about the sounds of food itself, and you're writing in your book that we, our ears are acutely attuned to sound and the sound of food. And you say that, you know, a human being, can you show that a human being can, if they don't, you don't really think about it. But they can tell the difference between. Uh, pouring a hot, a kettle of hot water or a kettle of cold water. You can tell the difference in what it sounds like.

Barbara:

Yes. And I've done this experiment with hundreds of people and everyone gets it right.

Speaker 3:

I

Barbara:

That's so cool. But it's shocking. I know. It's the coolest thing in the world. You wouldn't think that hot water sounds different than cold water, but it does

Francis:

you should really pick up this book. It's really fascinating. It was,

Mark:

it was really interesting. Barb, obviously you're really interesting. the science here is. it's something you can intuit, but I, but like you said, nobody wrote it down. Nobody put it on, on the pages and nobody said, here, this is how it really works. And I love to read a

Francis:

book where I go and, you know, mark and I have been paying attention to food. I mean, we were in college, we were paying attention to food, and we've owned our own restaurants for 20 years. And, but I remember that was our first trip to Italy together. After we'd opened the restaurant, we went to Mark and Mark's wife and, uh. Mark is a huge pastry fan and a huge Cannoli fan. And I remember, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I remember. You remember what I'm talking about? I, I know the story. We were in Verona, I think Verona we're in downtown Verona and we found a pastry shop that made Cannolis. Now, mark, we used to, we still get great cannolis from Manhattan and from Brooklyn, but um, and we made great cannolis in our own restaurant, but we hadn't had an Italian restaurant at that time. And Mark went in and got a cannoli and he was like, it was like the holy grail. He's like, and he says, with a mouth half full of can. That's it. That's what I'm talking about. And he closes his mouth and he chews and he points at his cheek. He wants me to listen to his cheek because the, the cannoli shell was crunching just perfectly. Oh. And you know what, I love that. That is what makes a great cannoli. It's the textural, it's the text textural difference in your mouth. Yes. Right?

Barbara:

Yes. That textural contrast, as we call it, is something that human beings love. And anytime you can create a textural contrast between something that's, for example, really creamy and sweet and soft in the middle, and crunchy and crisp on the outside, those two things together. Make for a really nicely balanced combination that we tend to love. And there's so many things out

Mark:

there. Dynamic contrast is why we love ice cream cones. It's why we love Oreo cookies. You, it's, it's all those things.

Francis:

You know, when we, when we do pastry in the restaurant and you make a gilet or something, the Gelee should, and you put it on your tongue, the heat of your tongue should turn it back into a liquid. It should, you know, when you get ice cream from home, take that Ben and Jerry's pint out of the freezer for. 15 minutes, or if you, if you, you've just come from an experiment at Barb Stuckey's, you can put it in the oven at like 200 degrees to get it cooler faster. Right. But you want it like where it's just about to melt, you know? Yeah. And that, I mean, that is just really, you know, why,

Mark:

why don't I enjoy pate unless I have it with a crouton? Right. Okay. I don't enjoy Pat Exactly. Unless I have it with something crunchy.

Barbara:

I, I'm with you on that fo gra as well, and I, I think one of the, one of the things that you're talking about is the, um, the eating food at the correct temperature, and that is really important.

Speaker 3:

Oh,

Barbara:

and one of the things that is, for example, ice cream. Ice cream is formulated so that it tastes. Perfect when it's frozen. If you were to thaw ice cream and, and you know, let it thaw into a liquid and you tasted that ice cream when it was at room temperature, it would taste horrible. It would taste way too sweet. It would taste way too creamy. And the that is because it's formulated specifically to be eaten at a frozen temperature. Now what happens when you. Eat something at the proper temperature, and that might require warming it up a little bit or letting it melt a little bit on your counter, is that the texture of course changes, but also the volatile aromas or the aroma molecules that give it its signature aroma, they become much more active at room temperature or at hotter temperatures, and so you really are getting more aroma from warmer food. More aroma translates into more flavor, so warmer food. Has more flavor.

Mark:

And one of the things we can do in the restaurant, which, you know, you just don't have the advantage of when you're buying something off a off a shelf, is we can adjust our, our, we know what temperature we're gonna sell our ice cream's at. Right? So we can adjust the flavors in our ice cream so that the flavor you're going to the, the you hit temperature you're gonna eat it at is the flavor is what we want. Yeah. Is the flavor that we

Francis:

want. You know, and just to point out, I mean, if, if you want proof of this, I, my my, um, my dad was ill for a long time before he passed away for about 18 months. And so I spent a lot of time outside of, uh, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. And, uh, you know, it would be a marathon affair, you know, and I'd be bored and, and there was always a Mr. Softy, truck parked out in front of the, and I thought, you know, I remember not liking that very much as a kid, but I'm gonna go and have myself a Mr. Softy. It was like 90 degrees. And I went and I got myself a Mr. Softy ice cream cone and I licked it and it wasn't very good. So I wasn't really that into it, but I was looking for garbage can to throw it away and, and I walked around and it's 90 degrees out and I'm like. It's not melting, it's not, it's not changing. And so as an experiment, I, I sat there and it sort of eventually got melt ish. if you look at, I'll name another brand Seal test ice cream. you take it out and it's got that little corner, like it's a corner of the box. And I haven't done this in years, so maybe it's changed, but as it melts, if you leave it in a bowl of melt, it will retain its structure to a very warm temperature. Go to a lot of fast food restaurants, get a thick shake. Thick shake is not a milkshake. It's a thick shake. It's made of thick and, and, and, you know, let it get warm and it often remains thick. Well, not only is that a problem, tell you there's something fake in your food, but it also says, it, it it, One of the things that's false flat about those things, it's like, don't get the dynamic contrast. It doesn't turn to clean liquid on my palate. It turns to grease. It turns to That's right. You know, it's, I, I find that you, you can, that dynamic contrast is very important and in the cheapest of cheap foods, that's what you lose.

Barbara:

Yes. And, and that, that, that ability of something to start melting when it hits your tongue, that generally that that's an inborn response. You know, we we're born with the response of how of liking that, that textural change because it generally signals the presence of fat. And so, you know, things that are fat will change from solid to liquid. When you just apply the heat of your mouth. And, and so those things are, are very, very positive to us. I, I don't know'cause I don't know anything about Mr. Softy, but I'm guessing that, that, that, that. White stuff, whatever it was, was, was much lower in fat than most normal ice cream. And, and so when you, when you tasted it, it just tasted wrong.

Francis:

Right. And you know, it's designed to be, I'm like, you know, it's a 90 degree day, they're making this on a truck. How do, and a truck is in the sun. How do they do that? Well, they do it by, by creating a thing that doesn't melt in, in consistent, there's

Mark:

another thing that you may not be aware of. What's that? It's called refrigeration. Yeah, they could do that now. But you know, that's the thing. It wasn't

Francis:

that cold, you know? I think it was just exp Anyway, so enough about Mr. Softy. Here's a question that, you know, after reading your book that I, I sort of think about, maybe it's a philosophical question, maybe it's nothing you can answer, but you might want to let us know. What you think about it is, is the best food. Always complex. Is that the difference? I mean,'cause look, we, you know, we, we, you can make a tortilla chip and it's crunch and it's salt and it's okay and you know, it's all right. But to be really great, does food need to be complex?

Barbara:

I do not think so at all.

Francis:

Okay. No,

Barbara:

no. In fact, I used to review restaurants and, um, I've been eating professionally for 15 years. Um, I, I am at a point in my dining career where the fancier and fussier and more structured and higher the concept. When it comes to food, the less likely I am to crave it. And so, you know, what do I crave? Well, I crave a big bowl of really properly cooked pasta with a simple drizzle of green olive oil and some kosher salt, and a shaving of fresh Parmesan aged Parmesan cheese. And to me, that is craveable. Now that doesn't mean that. When I go to these with molecular gastronomy restaurants or I go to very fancy, uh, Michelin starred restaurants, that doesn't mean that I don't have a great experience. I do, but it's not the food I crave. So I think you have to make that distinction between really good food. Is the food at these, these upscale restaurants, is it good? Absolutely. Do you crave it? Probably not. And probably the reason you don't is because it's so complex.

Mark:

Alright, I want, I wanna pause it another question and, and maybe look at that same question a little differently. Isn't a peach really complex. That's exactly where I was going. Isn't the flavor of a peach really complex? I

Francis:

think we were talking about, you know, okay, you get the peach in the supermarket. It's like, it's okay. It's kind of peachy. But when you get that like white peach in August from the right, thrown in the right soils, I'm talking about that flavor itself. It's just, to me that is just like, it's not just sweet. It's, it's, it's almost indescribable to me. And, and, and it's complex. I mean, it's got acidity. It's got texture, it's got, well, that's what we think, but what do you think about that?

Barbara:

I think you're absolutely right. And, and generally what will be different between that supermarket peach that doesn't have a lot of peakiness going on, and the perfectly ripe peach that you pluck off of the tree from, you know, the, the countryside and eat. Warm from the tree. The difference between those two will be the amount and intensity of the volatile aromas that are present. Probably it'll be a little bit softer too. So there's um. There's a slight difference in the texture. It might have more sweetness because it's been allowed to stay on the vine longer, to develop a little bit more sweetness. But the really big difference if you were to cut this peach up and puree it and run it through a a gas homography mass spectrometry, which I do very

Mark:

often, which

Barbara:

right most people have at home in the basement. That would tell you that, that that really, really perfect rye peach is just loaded with those really volatile aromas that give it that peachy, fuzzy, fruity green, um, sulfur free. All of the aromas that come together and say peachy. It has more of that going on.

Francis:

Well, Barb Stuckey, we think you are just peachy. Thanks for coming on our show today, mark. Just I'm hanging

Mark:

my, I'm hanging my head in disgust, Barb. I'm sorry. Not at, not at, not

Francis:

at you. That was, but at Francis. That was a, that was a lo, I couldn't let that go by. Uh, Barb, seriously, your book is great. Thanks for coming on the show.

Barbara:

Oh, thank you guys for having me. It was really fun.

Francis:

Barb Stuckey's book is Taste What You're Missing. The Passionate Eaters Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Great. Pick it up. It's a fantastic read and uh, check it out on the restaurant guys. Thanks Barb, at restaurant guys radio.com. Thank you. We'll be back in just a minute. Don't you dare go away.

Mark:

Hey everybody. Welcome back. It's Mark and Francis. Um, yeah, great book. You know, I France and I talk about books a lot. This is one that you should get because it was interesting and dynamic and had lots of information that was easy to read and easy to digest, no pun intended. Um. You know, we talked about something earlier in the show. You intended that pun you, you intended that pun. I'm calling you out on that. It was an intended pun. Go ahead. We talked about something earlier in the show and I, and I, and I didn't want to interrupt Barb and, and tell this story, you know, she talked about the perception of food. Mm-hmm. Way back when I, I took a trip to Egypt as a, as a young man and I ate in a place in a, in a nightclub and it was very dark. Hmm. And, you know, I, I ordered the chicken and, uh, probably wasn't chicken. It was very disconcerting for me. Mm-hmm. And, and eating in the dark, it was really an uncomfortable experience for me. I mean, it wasn't pitch black, but I really couldn't see the intricate details of what I was eating. Yeah. And I ate and it was fine, and I didn't get sick or anything like that. But I will say that to this day, I, I don't enjoy eating if I can't see my food because it was a mouse that you, oh. Did you ordered the chicken. Oh, here you go. I'm pretty sure that mouse is a kind word for what I was eating, but, but like I said, besides that, it, it's really true. I mean, send the rat to table 24, turn the lights out and, and eat something that somebody else has prepared for you and, and give it a try. It's not as pleasurable as it is to eat when you're looking at your food. It just isn't.

Francis:

And, um, we're gonna leave you with this note. Uh, you know, one of the great things about a restaurant and one of the reasons a food tastes so great in a restaurant is a lot of it's what we do. And when you pick a great restaurant and you're paying attention in a restaurant, um, we make sure the music's right. We make sure the lights are right, and you put away your iPhone, turn off the television, turn off the stereo talk with the person across, from you, and. We love when you come to our restaurants and do that, but you can do that on your own at home, right? So. Turn off your iPhone for 15 minutes. Focus on having dinner, focus on having dinner and talking with somebody you love. And uh, if three people do that as a result of this show, we'll have done our day's work for today. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this hour as much as we have. I am Francis Shock. And I'm Mark Pascal. We're the restaurant guys@restaurantguysradio.com.