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The Educated Palate's Culinary Flavors sensory development
kits
  Why it is important for Chefs and
Culinary Students
Rachel S. Herz, Ph. D.
March 12, 2004
Except for the sensations of salt, sour, sweet, bitter and “umami”
(savory), just about all of our flavor experiences come from
smell. So using our sense of smell is extremely important for
anyone wanting to work with flavors and create delicious tastes.
We aren’t usually taught to recognize scents by their names
and there are also very few words in English (or any language)
that refer specifically to smell sensations. As a result most
of us have a very small vocabulary when it comes to our smell
experiences and research shows that our ability to experience
smell sensations can be limited by the lack of verbal descriptors.
Also our consistency for using names for scents is rather random.
You may call a certain scent “oregano” sometimes, but the same
scent “thyme” or just “Italian herb” at other times. And knowing
that what you mean when you say “oregano” is the same as what
I mean when I say “oregano,” has been almost impossible to equate--
until now. The Educated Palate’s “Culinary flavors sensory development
kit” is about to change the way chefs and culinary students
learn, talk about, appreciate, manipulate and create flavor
sensations.
The “Culinary flavors sensory development kit” is the first
one of its kind and works by teaching connections between particular
verbal labels and specific scents and tastes. The kit contains
vials of culinary herb and spice samples (e.g., marjoram, thyme,
rosemary, oregano, cumin) and flavorings (e.g., vanilla, soy,
butterscotch, licorice, maple) and the user is taught to connect
each aroma and taste with its name and thus learn a gold standard
scent-name connection for every food aroma. Training with this
kit also teaches users to pay attention to the emotions and
associations that each aroma evokes and thus learn all the angles
and aspects of how each aroma is perceived and described.
Training with the “culinary flavors sensory development kit”
has many uses and advantages. First, it will enable chefs to
converse with one another and know exactly what the other means;
thus standardizing a language for talking about and defining
flavor experiences. Second, by teaching discrete label-scent/taste
relationships, this kit will provide a new way to teach food
science and culinary skills to professionals and novices. Third,
this kit will teach chefs how to dissect and appreciate standard
as well as novel flavor aromas.
Finally, this kit provides a shortcut to odor imagery and the
creation of new flavor sensations. By using the language-smell
associations that have developed from training with the kit,
chefs will be able to create new complex flavor sensations in
their minds, and therefore waste minimum time and ingredients
in the kitchen. This kit is an excellent and innovative teaching
and working tool for the professional chef and novice culinary
student alike.
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