Texture and Serving Temperature.
Melted ice cream tastes sickly sweet; warm cola tastes syrupy. Nothing changed but the temperature.
Temperature changes flavour through two routes. Aroma: warmer food releases more aroma molecules (XI.1), so hot soup smells of far more than the same soup cold. And taste itself: the sweet-taste receptors respond much more strongly at mouth temperature than when chilled — their response climbs steeply between about 15 and 35 °C — and bitterness and saltiness shift a little too. Ice cream is made very sweet because it is eaten frozen; let it melt and the same sugar tastes cloying.
Texture is the other half of how food is judged in the mouth: crisp and crunchy, tender and chewy, creamy and smooth, and the contrasts between them. It is fragile. Fried and roasted crusts go soft as steam from the inside reaches them (IX.6); sauces thicken as they cool (VII.2); fats firm in the fridge (IX.2). So cooks plan for the moment of eating: season cold food more boldly, serve fried food at once, add crisp garnishes at the last minute. The workshop warms a sweet dessert.
Below: relative sweetness and relative aroma release against serving temperature (a teaching curve shaped on the measured temperature sensitivity of the sweet receptor, and Clausius–Clapeyron for a typical aroma), with fridge, freezer and mouth marked.
- Explain how temperature changes taste and smell.
- Season food for the temperature it is served at.
- Protect textures until serving.
- Use contrast of texture deliberately.
Taste it as it will be eaten
In this teaching curve the same sugar tastes about 5.1 times as sweet in melted ice cream at 30 °C as in ice cream at −12 °C; a cola at fridge temperature is about 0.17 as sweet as at mouth temperature and at room temperature 0.62. Aroma follows too: food at 4 °C releases about 0.13 of the aroma it would at 37 °C, food at 60 °C about 3.3 times as much. So taste cold dishes cold before serving, and season them a little more boldly — potato salad, cold noodles, chilled soups and terrines all need it.
Protect texture until the last moment. Fry and serve; do not cover crisp food, which traps steam; dress salads at the table; add toasted nuts, crisp shallots (油葱酥) or crackling at the end; and serve contrasts — crisp with soft, hot with cold, smooth with crunchy — which keep each mouthful interesting. A dish that is right at the stove may be wrong at the table ten minutes later: thick sauces may need loosening, and rice and pasta firm as they cool.
Taste a spoon of the same fruit juice or soft drink straight from the fridge, at room temperature and gently warmed. The warmer spoons taste noticeably sweeter.
Terms
- Serving temperature
- The temperature at which a dish is eaten, which shapes its flavour.
- Mouthfeel
- How food feels in the mouth: creamy, crisp, astringent, and so on.
- Texture contrast
- Combining different textures in one dish or bite.
- 脆
- Crisp: breaking cleanly with a crunch.
Sources
- K. Talavera et al., "Heat activation of TRPM5 underlies thermal sensitivity of sweet taste", Nature 438, 1022–1025 (2005): the sweet-taste channel's response rises steeply between about 15 and 35 °C.
- NIST Chemistry WebBook (SRD 69): normal boiling points and enthalpies of vaporisation; octanol–water partition coefficients (log P) from PubChem. Vapour pressure from the Clausius–Clapeyron equation.
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.