How many basic tastes do you know?

Andrea Varga-Darabos How many basic tastes do you know? 30 September 2016 | 2 minute reading time

As children we learned that there were 4 basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Recently it turned out that the most sophisticated tasters can distinguish a fifth one too: the mysterious umami. It’s present in tomatoes, spinach, cheese and fish. It has been used in oriental cuisine for a long time but the fact that this intense and pleasant taste belongs to the basic tastes may surprise many.

And that’s not the end of it. It also turns out that there are a number of candidates in line for the title of the sixth basic taste. The line-up includes calcium and even water could be recognised for its special and unique taste.

However, the list is topped by the aroma that makes pasta and pastries so irresistible. It’s this taste that makes it so hard to get pasta and dough off your diet – no other food brings out that characteristically sweet taste of grains. That’s why many people on a diet miss bread and pasta a lot.

Until recently, nutritionists and nutritional scientists thought that grains had no taste. Nowadays, we know that an enzyme in our saliva helps to transform grains’ nutrients into special sugars. It’s the taste of those sugars that gives the fine, sweet and quite unmatched flavour of rice and other grains as well as the flavour of pasta. On top of that, studies have confirmed that just like the five basic flavours, the taste of grains is also perceived in a distinct area on our tongue.

How difficult would it be for you to live without grains?