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Tampering with Taste Buds for Better Coffee?
An anonymous reader writes "A Globe and Mail article states that scientists are busy working on making everything taste great: " In a small office just west of the New Jersey Turnpike, researchers are taking the human taste bud into a brave new world.
Here, it is not cream or milk that the employees of Linguagen Corp. add to their morning java, but a dash of a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte"
We don't need some mad scientist in jersey to cook up funky chemicals that make bitter into sweet, mother nature already did it a long time ago with the miracle berry.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
According to the article, the alterations in perception are very temporary. So while you're drinking that black, bitter coffee it probably tastes great, but in about five minutes you'll get that aftertaste and want to brush your teeth.
Turns out that this company already sells to the fast food chains:
Beef flavor for hamburgers: The beef is so processed by the time that the company is done with it, they need to 'add flavor back in'. Guess how?
Fries flavor: Yes, you have sale and sugar, but did you know that McD's also adds 'beef flavor' to the fries? There was a lawsuit about this a while back when they were using 'real beaf', unbeknowst to many Hindi customers. Gues what they use now?
There was a lot more 'stuff' and discussion about how this food is processed before it ends up in your burger bun. Though I haven't bought the book (yet), I haven't been back to a McDonalds since, either...
The best thing that could happen would be to mask tingling in the tongue. Tongues can tell bitterness, sweetness, etc. apart, and the texture of the food, but that's all.
(OT, but BTW: I remember reading some time back that those popular "taste" regions on a tongue aren't really accurate since your whole tongue can taste the difference between bitterness, sweetness, etc.)
SMELL is the key to taste.
slash. posts suggest that spoiled milk could 'taste' delicious, but your tongue is useless at taste unless it is genetically super-calibrated. The way you can 'TASTE' something is with the SMELL before and while the food is in your mouth. If you close your nose and drink spoiled milk with the texture and flow of normal milk, you won't know you did until you get stomach poisoning.
Yes, although bitterness is associated with toxicity (stuff-you-shouldn'-put-in-your-mouth) and it does apply to most everything,, smell is what really tells you if something is bad or not. You won't be able to tell the taste mandarine and an orange, and maybe even an apple and orange (except for texture obviously) if your nose and eyes are closed.
You might have learned this on Bill Nye the Science Guy or by reading a book, or the internet. Or some of us participated in all three.
Follow this lab:
Here's a link to a 4th grade lab assignment on this.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
You should read the amazing "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. One of the chapters talks about the "taste" industry ('flavorists') and all these companies setup along the NJ turnpike. They make a liquid chemical agent that smells exactly like a flame-broiled burger. The reason: the food is so shitty that the taste disappears when it is processed. It has to be added 'back'...
Same idea coming to a Starbucks near you? Great world we live in!
there's no place like ~
a lot of european coffee is cafe crema, not percolated or automatic drip like here in the US.
the difference is that the hot water is forced through the grounds under high pressure which helps
to get the crema foam and tasty organic compounds without getting the last part of the bitter dregs.
the resulting coffee is strong but smooth and not bitter, dark with a lighter colored foam on top even
before you add cream or milk
www.capresso.com is one web site that sells machines that make cafe crema.
The automatic machines would be great in a office if people can clean up after themselves
Anyway, there was one show where they visited a coffee factory. Man, these guys take coffee seriously. They had people checking the beans to make sure they are the right color, size, etc. They also had this one room where a group of people do nothing but taste batches of coffee all day long. Hopefully, they medical fully covers medication for insomnia.
Also, if you ask for a latte over there, you'll get a glass of milk. And if I remember corretly, if you want what we refer to as a latte, you have to ask for a cafe americano. Crazy Italians.
Um... the main reason people eat unhealthy food is because it tastes better.
Price will factor into this, but I think producers will settle on a reasonably nutritious base material, like that clover growing in your back yard.
--
est modus in rebus
No. Do NOT boil coffee. The ideal temperature for brewing coffee is just short of boiling, like 98C or so. If you could keep it at exactly that temperature, that would be best. But, if you do not posess the means to keep water at exactly 98C, simply boil the water, let it sit for like 15-30 seconds, and mix in the grounds.
If you are going to add the grounds directly to the water, it is best to grind them fairly coarse, so you will be able to filter them well, and control the brewing better. The finer the grind, the more sensitive it is to the time it is brewed for. Espresso can be finely ground because it is only being brewed for a few seconds. If you underbrew the coffee, by grinding TOO coarse, water too cold, or not brewing long enough, the coffee will be weak and watery. If you overbrew the coffee, by grinding too fine, water too hot, or brewing too long, it will be bitter. You have to experiment to find the ideal time. Also, if the water is too hot, it will cook the coffee, and ruin the flavour.
BTW, auto drip isn't that bad if you know what you are doing. Percolation is BY FAR the worst method. Auto drip is qute consistent, and easy. If you do it right you can get great coffee. Its not the best method, but it is OK. Auto drip makers with a hot plate should be avoided. If the coffee remains on the hot plate, it will get bitter very quickly. The best ones have a thermal carafe, which keeps the coffee hot by insulation. They work quite well.
BY FAR the best thing you can do for coffee is to buy good beans, and grind them yourself. Get a burr grinder, which has two thingies that look like the balls from those IBM ball typewriter thingies, rather than one that has the little spinning blade. It will grind the coffee much more evenly, and not heat it up as much.
/usr/games/fortune
Yeah, fresh rosted beans are VERY important, and never get ground. Grind it yourself, preferably in a burr type grinder (which has little thingies in it like the balls in the old IBM type-ball typewriters) rather than one that has a little blade that spins.
Since roasted beans give off a lot of carbon dioxide, you want to wait 24 hours after they are roasted before grinding and brewing them. If you don't, the coffee will taste odd. However, make sure you use up all the coffee within a week. After a week it starts getting really stale.
Don't freeze coffee. A lot of people do, but there is no reason to. Coffee that has sat on a counter for two weeks is better than coffee that has been in the freezer for a day. When you take the coffee out, condensation forms, and it gets nasty. Don't freeze it, buy less of it.
/usr/games/fortune
MSG is a neurotoxin. It excites brain cells to death. I, at least, am incredibly sensitive to it.
:-(
It wasn't always that way. For years and years I was able to eat it without problems. However, I started drinking a lot of diet pepsi, and after a couple of years of that, got very, very sick. Couldn't pin down what the problem was. My vision was damaged, my memory was shot, my ability to focus/concentrate was gone. I was having coordination problems. When they examined at me at one neurologist, I couldn't even walk heel and toe; I lost my balance. Every time. I was really a mess. At the time they thought I might have multiple sclerosis. They ruled that out with an MRI, but I still had many of the same symptoms. (it turns out aspartame poisoning is frequently mistaken for MS).
Things started improving after I stopped aspartame (which is a much stronger neurotoxin than is MSG), but it wasn't until I realized that MSG was also (now) causing me trouble that I started to get back to anything approaching normal. I don't think I'll ever be what I was, but I'd call myself 90% recovered at this point.
I don't know why I reacted so badly to aspartame/MSG and many people don't. However, they are both documented neurotoxins, and I tend to think that any group of people that relies primarily on their brains to function should avoid them.
MSG makes food taste good because it excites nerve cells; they are fooled into thinking that the food you are eating has more 'goodness' in it than it actually does. That tingly feeling you sometimes get after you've had a lot of MSG? (lips and fingertips are common). That's nerve cells being overstimulated, often to death.
This stuff sneaks up on you; I was having minor symptoms I didn't think were important for at least a year before I got really sick. You don't get really visible symptoms until you have lost about 75% of the brain cells in a given functional area; the brain is highly resilient to damage. But it doesn't last forever.
There used to be a really wonderful site with tons of information about MSG at www.123recipes.com. They had a great section on what it can do to you and the (MANY!) ways that manufacturers try to hide the fact that they have added it to food. (it's in probably 90% of the foods on the shelf-- you're probably getting a whopping great dose of MSG every day without even knowing it.) But 123recipes.com seems to have gone away.
I would suggest reading up on MSG -- you should realize just how many things it's in. (basically almost everything on the shelf). Due to a curiosity of Federal regulation, only 100% pure MSG needs to be labeled as "monosodium glutamate". So manufacturers just put in 90% pure MSG instead and call it something else.
They hide it in all sorts of ways.... the most common label is "natural flavors". Another very common one is any type of "hydrolyzed" protein. Yeast extract and autolyzed yeast extract are two more. (I avoid anything with a -lyzed suffix now). "Caseinate" is another trigger word; I usually see it as "milk caseinate" but I've seen it used as a modifier on other source foods as well. "Modified starch" is the most recent trick I'm aware of.
For more on aspartame, www.aspartametruth.com has many links to studies, etc. Before getting sick, I probably wouldn't have paid that much attention to it, but I can tell you from personal experience that many of the described symptoms are absolutely real and valid -- I have had them myself. I presume, since I had so many of the listed problems, that most of the links are truthful. Read carefully, but I can assure you that there is definitely a real core here. It is not just hysterical armwaving.
One thing I sometimes think about... over the lsat 20 years, there has been an enormous rise in the use of neurotoxins in food. At the same time, there seems to be an overwhelming rise in stupidity. I don't know if these two are causally linked, but I do wonder.