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Although most Scotch whisky is blended from different casks, a firm distinction exists in the minds of consumers and in the marketing of Scotch between single malts and blended whiskies. Consumers are offered ...
There can be little doubt that plating food beautifully is becoming ever more important in the world of high-end cuisine. However, there is a very real danger that all the attention to how a dish looks (or pho...
This opinion piece takes a critical look at the current state of hospital food, with a focus on the UK’s National Health Service. Some of the unique challenges facing those serving food in this situation are i...
Shape can play an important role in our perception of food. In this study, the consequences of crossmodal correspondences between shape and taste on the expected and actual experience of eating chocolate were ...
β-glucosidase is an enzyme important to flavour enhancement. It hydrolyzes glucosides to release aglycones—aroma precursors that are bound to a sugar molecule—thereby making them available to contribute to the...
This review addresses a number of questions around the relation between food and decision-making/social behaviour, including the following: Can food be used as a tool of political persuasion? What role, if any...
We review the evidence suggesting that the bistable/multistable percepts that exist in the so-called higher senses of vision, audition, and touch do not seem to occur in the chemical senses (e.g. taste, aroma,...
Flavour is a key driver of liking, purchase behaviour and consumption of food and beverages. Determining how individuals differ in their perception of flavour is important to fully understanding dietary choice...
Diet and lifestyle are not only related to wellbeing but also have dramatic effects on the burdens of ill health and non-communicable diseases. Drawing upon anthropological evidence for human evolution and the...
This paper describes how food is sensed in both the mouth where it produces food reward and pleasantness that guides food intake and is sensed in the gut where it produces satiety and conditioned effects inclu...
A growing body of evidence, both anecdotal and scientifically rigorous, now points to the fact that what people taste when evaluating a wine, not to mention how much they enjoy the experience, can be influence...
The majority of the literature on sensory expectations has focused solely on those that are set by the eye, that is, by what we see. However, although we rarely think about it, the sounds we hear prior to tast...
For years now, wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies. Until recently, however, it has never been altogether clear how widely shared, and hence mea...
A growing body of scientific evidence now shows that what people taste when evaluating a wine, and how much they enjoy the experience, can be influenced by the music that happens to be playing at the same time...
The majority of researchers agree that olfactory cues play a dominant role in our perception and enjoyment of the taste (or rather flavour) of food and drink. It is no surprise then that in recent years, a var...
Many researchers distinguish between two senses of smell—orthonasal (when we inhale or sniff) and retronasal (when volatiles are pulsed out from the back of the nose during eating). Orthonasal olfactory cues a...
It is frequently asserted that somewhere between 75 and 95 % of what we commonly think of as taste actually comes from the sense of smell. However, empirical evidence in support of such a precise-sounding quan...
With high-end chefs being increasingly considered as artists, gastronomy offers a new domain for our understanding of creativity. As several claims have been made about the link between synaesthesia and creati...
Recent evidence suggests that products believed to be healthy may be over-consumed relative to believed indulgent or highly caloric products. The extent to which these effects relate to expectations from label...
We report three online experiments designed to investigate how the visual presentation of a dish influences people’s rating of exactly the same ingredients. For this, participants were visually presented with ...
We report a study conducted in a realistic dining environment, in which two groups of diners were served the same three-course meal. The presentation of the starter (centred vs. offset plating), the type of cu...
A growing body of scientific research has recently started to demonstrate how both music and soundscapes can influence people’s perception of the taste, flavour, and mouthfeel of food and drink. However, to da...
Onions (Allium cepa) are widely used as a flavor agent ingredient in culinary preparations to bring specific cooked onion notes. In this study, three traditional types of preparations—sué, sautéed, and pan-fried ...
Can basic tastes, such as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and possibly also umami, be conveyed by means of colour? If so, how should we understand the relationship between colours and tastes: Is it universal or re...
While recent studies demonstrate the unexpected influence of plate shape and abstract names on the taste and flavour of foods, it is still challenging to derive more specific rules about how to use verbal and ...
Colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink. To date, a large body of laboratory re...
Long-time low-temperature sous-vide cooking of meat enables the chef to precisely and robustly reach a desired gastronomic outcome. In long-time low-temperature sous-vide cooking, time and temperature can be u...
Increased preference for fat and sugar or reduced taste sensitivity may play a role in overweight and obesity development, but sensory perceptions are probably influenced already during childhood by food cultu...
Sound is the forgotten flavour sense. You can tell a lot about the texture of a food—think crispy, crunchy, and crackly—from the mastication sounds heard while biting and chewing. The latest techniques from th...
As all chefs know, great food can have a transformational impact. A great deal of recent research has gone into using the new techniques from molecular gastronomy and gastrophysics to create innovative meals w...
Flavour science is concerned with the sensory appreciation of food. However, flavor is not in the food; it is created by the brain, through multiple sensory, motor, and central behavioral systems. We call this...
Nordic Food Lab (NFL) is a non-profit, open-source organisation that investigates food diversity and deliciousness. We combine scientific and cultural approaches with culinary techniques from around the world ...
In the last 15 years, advancements in molecular biology have unraveled the proteins that function as taste receptors. There are at least five taste qualities that are consciously perceived, sweet, sour, salty,...
This article outlines what it means to see taste as a social sense, that means as an activity related to socio-cultural context, rather than as an individual matter of internal reflection. Though culture in th...
Recently, many chefs have collaborated with researchers and used scientific techniques in their cooking. These researchers advise chefs from a scientific perspective. However, they do not know what chefs think...
Some foods are known to have flavours that cannot be explained by the five basic tastes alone, such as continuity, mouthfulness and thick flavour. It was demonstrated that these sensations are evoked by the ad...
Flavour perception reflects the integration of distinct sensory signals, in particular odours and tastes, primarily through the action of associative learning. This gives rise to sensory interactions derived f...
In this short paper, I discuss two interpretations of the implications of food reward for healthy eating. It is often argued that foods that are palatable and provide sensory pleasure lead to overeating. I dis...
Taste is the chemical sense responsible for the detection of non-volatile chemicals in potential foods. For fat to be considered as one of the taste primaries in humans, certain criteria must be met including ...
Each animal lives in its own sensory world that is coordinated with its diet. In this brief review, we describe several examples of this coordination from studies of the sense of taste, particularly from speci...
An understanding and description of our sensory perception of food requires input from many different scientific disciplines: in addition to the natural and life sciences, human sciences, social sciences, as w...
Recent studies have demonstrated that kokumi substances such as glutathione are perceived through the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR). Screening by a CaSR assay and sensory evaluation have shown that γ-glutamyl-v...
Recent studies have demonstrated that kokumi substances, which enhance basic tastes and modify mouthfulness and continuity although they have no taste themselves, are perceived through the calcium-sensing recepto...
This paper reviews the points behind the more than a hundred-year delay for the acceptance of umami as a basic taste along with the sweet, sour, salty, and bitter tastes after its discovery by a Japanese scien...
There is a close relationship between an individual’s perception of umami taste and that individual’s physical condition. Our newly developed umami taste sensitivity test revealed the loss of only the umami ta...
The aim of this study was to conceptualize a new dish design process used by highly reputable chefs at fine dining restaurants, using cognitive modeling methods, and prioritize the important culinary success f...
We investigated whether consumers’ perception of a café latte beverage would be influenced by the colour (transparent, white or blue) of the mug from which it was drunk.
Noise is currently the second most common complaint amongst restaurant-goers, behind poor service. In fact, over the last decade or two, many restaurants have become so loud that some critics now regularly rep...
We report on what may well be the world’s largest multisensory tasting experiment. Over a period of 4 days in May 2014, almost 3,000 people sampled a glass of red wine in a room in which the colour of the ligh...
Researchers have demonstrated that a variety of visual factors, such as the colour and balance of the elements on a plate, can influence a diner’s perception of, and response to, food. Here, we report on a stu...
Flavour