Trust Your Taste Buds, Not the Algorithm

Don't tell me how to eat! - George Costanza

Can I put ketchup on it? Do you think this needs salt? What is bolanages supposed to taste like? Should I eat my noodles al dente? What kind of herb do I garnish my soup with? What if I don’t like pepper? I love blue cheese, can I use it even though the recipe doesn’t call for it?

Any of these questions resonate with you?

You have the best intentions of getting your booty into the kitchen, you are slicing, dicing, and seasoning like your life depends on it, and then you realize that you are constantly second-guessing yourself. Turning to Chat to ask questions as if AI knows better than you or can even TASTE😒! You do not trust your taste buds and are constantly in a state of panic on whether or not your food even tastes good😵‍💫?!

You are NOT alone.

Learning to trust and follow your palate is a journey, and with no guidance, you might feel like you are stranded on a desert island with nothing but a volleyball to talk to. (Psst, that volleyball can’t taste either, so less helpful than Chat, and it will still ultimately be up to you.) We are going straight to the source today—what even is a palate? Do I have one? Where can I get one? Can I get a refund if mine is not up to par?

In a physical sense, your palate is made up of everything that is involved when you taste food. The 5 senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and, of course, taste! Our taste buds send little handwritten messages to the brain about what we are eating. Is it salty, sweet, sour, bitter, or umami we are experiencing?

Your palate is also determined by external factors like your environment, genetics, emotional experiences, culture, exposure, moods, and how you were raised. The reasons why we may or may not like a certain food, flavor profile, or texture can go far BEYOND our taste buds. Which is fascinating, right?!

When I was a kid, my family and I were driving home from a basketball game, and I was in the back of the station wagon, secretly eating a Kit Kat bar. I was being secretive because it was late, and there was NO WAY my parents would have let that slide. The next day, I was sick, throwing up, and very unwell. I couldn’t eat a Kit Kat bar for YEARS after that experience. Not because I don’t like them, but because my brain associated them with being sick. Whether or not they made me sick is unclear; I am sure I ate a plethora of grease-ridden faux cheese snacks at the game, so it could have been any number of things. My brain chose to take it out on the Kit Kat, very grateful as I don’t know what I would do without hot dogs😂.

Now that we have a better understanding of how our palates came to be, let’s here and now promise not to judge people based on their palate preferences. We have NO clue what is going on in that brain of theirs, and really, it’s none of our business. BUT what we will do if you are up for it is focus on our OWN palate and start to refine it! Refine meaning, start paying attention to how you are experiencing food using your 5 senses. This is the best research project you could ask for because the research is to eat! It would be good to take notes, as it will help you write your palate-themed thesis statement later.

When you are eating dinner this week, eat slowly and notice every flavor profile (salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umami) in each bite of food.

What flavor notes does your steak have?

What flavor notes does your coffee with cream have?

What flavor notes do your sauteed green beans have?

What flavor notes does your spinach salad w/goat cheese and candied pecans have?

Once you start identifying the flavor notes in your food, you may notice patterns in what your palate gravitates towards. Your list of likes and dislikes might begin to make sense, and maybe you, too, have a Kit Kat story that you need to unpack. (I have eaten Kit Kats recently; the aversion has passed.)

Example: Let’s say you love black coffee, arugula salads, and dark chocolate. All of these foods have a prominent bitter element to them. Congratulations, your palate likes bitter! Now pour yourself a Negroni.

PSA: There are no prizes here. It’s all about noticing what YOUR specific preferences are.

All of our senses play a crucial role in our palate preferences. Have you ever gotten a whiff of something on the stove and thought Hell no, I am not eating that. (The motto of French Cheese, more stinky more better.) What about looking at the Lobsters in the tank at a seafood restaurant, something in your brain switches, and no matter how good lobster is, you just can’t eat it after seeing that. My dear friend who enjoys the flavor of an avocado but finds the texture of guacamole completely off-putting. It’s a texture thing. (Can’t relate, but I do understand.)

Let’s get all the senses involved with our eating experience and see what happens.

Smell: Try plugging your nose when you eat a bite of pizza. How does this change your eating experience?

Touch: Try OR just imagine taking your dinner of chicken, roasted potatoes, and green beans (sounds delicious, right?) and pureeing it together in a blender. Should it be the same experience as taking a little bite of chicken, potato, and green bean all together on the same fork?

Sight: What comes to mind when you are served something mushy and brown and visually unappetizing?

Hearing: Tell someone how bad a food is before they eat it, and notice if their response mirrors your opinion. Take the same food and tell someone else (or the same person) how amazing the food is, and notice if their response is similar to your positivity. This is not a foolproof method, but an interesting experiment on how our sense of hearing can have an effect on how we experience food.

If you want to opt out of the mental games, think of the sound a food makes when you eat it. Crunching, cracking, slurping, gulping, smacking…mukbang anyone? Raise your hand if you have ever been put off by a food (or a person) because of eating sounds.🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♀️

Once you start playing around with your palate, you might want to kick things up a notch. Meaning picking out the flavor notes in the whole bite of food - what flavor is in the foreground and what flavor is in the background. This is how we approach wine tasting: at the end of the day, wine tastes like fermented grapes, BUT it can also taste earthy, spiced, fruity, or tannic. Did I lose ya🫠 Let me know if you want a wine-specific tasting crash course, I am down if you are!

I had the pleasure of meeting a whiskey taster (not sure of his official title) for Westland Whiskey in Seattle. The process of creating the perfect whiskey flavor profile was fascinating and went far beyond just drinking whiskey all day. He restricted his diet to NO spicy, salty, acidic, or sweet foods on tasting days. He never drank coffee, and it seemed that he survived on mostly bread and bland foods for the sake of his palate. THAT is commitment! I respect it, I don’t think we need to do that to understand our own palates. Let’s just avoid drinking a cup of coffee before we taste test the soup we are making.

You are on the way to understanding and trusting your palate. Congratulations, it is going to be a tasty ride! Remember, the only prize you might receive is a boost of confidence and a delicious dinner or two.

To further your palate journey:

Get Adventurous, experiment with flavors, try new cuisines, different meats, a sauce you have never heard of, an ingredient that you have no idea about, learn a new cooking technique, try a spice level that makes you squirm!

Go back to the things you may not have liked as a child and try them now. Our taste buds evolve over time, and emotional blocks may fade (remember the Kit Kat), and you might realize that green beans are actually one of your favorite foods!

Be open-minded, curious, and non-judgmental of what your palate journey brings up. Let the tasting begin! Don’t forget to take notes 🤓.

Be present when you are eating. Turn off the TV, put the phone away, take a nice, comfortable seat with a cold beverage, and focus on the task at hand. Our attention is a precious commodity these days, and luckily for us, we have three meals a day to practice our focus.

Trusting your palate is a process. Start implementing everything we have touched on slowly, and you will make leaps and bounds in the trust department. Shrugging off an annoying comment someone makes about liking or not liking food is just part of living on this planet. Remember, you are not better or worse than anyone if you can eat cilantro and it doesn’t taste like soap or if you prefer your steak well done because the texture of raw meat gives you the willies. Take a deep breath and let that stuff roll off.

Trusting yourself is a big confidence booster in the kitchen.

Extra, Extra

The Queen of building flavor, Samin Nosrat, just came out with a brand-new book last week! Good Things by Samin Nosrat. She is also the author of the beloved Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I highly recommend adding either of these books to your to-cook list. She is a wealth of knowledge and a great resource in the kitchen!

Cheers,

Nicole | Butter Cult