A tasting last week, a salumi tasting, set me off on this thought path about the mechanics of tasting. Colleagues and friends were gathered around the table when sample #1 hit: prosciutto di Parma, pre-sliced at the store. I was underwhelmed. Most of the other tasters were too. But one enthusiastic taster jumped right in: “That’s delicious,” he said!
Now, everyone on the planet is entitled to his or her own opinion. But if you’re a professional taster—making recommendations to readers and others, encouraging them to spend their money on what YOU like—there should be more behind it all than a knee-jerk response.
The reason I knew that that prosciutto di Parma was not “delicious”—was that I’ve tasted many prosciutti before. Not only have I tasted them, but I have committed to a kind of porcine memory bank the qualities that my favorite ones had. Then, while tasting a prosciutto di Parma today, I am able to call up an ideal profile, drawn from that memory bank, and compare the sample at hand to the hardened-in-brain profile.
“There’ll be better than this,” I said to my friend. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is delicious.” We went on to five more prosciutti. But before I bring you the thrilling conclusion…
Let’s discuss what kind of work brought me to that table that day, in that evaluative position.
Are tasters born or made? Did I come into the world wailing my wails over a “special” palate? Don’t know. Soon, I was growing up in a home where Dad was a great home cook, and liked to talk about food. That definitely helped. But Mom might have been even more important: her schnozz was beyond compare (and the schnozz is a huge part of your tasting mechanism!). When I was 20 or so, and off at college—and showing up at home a few days after a big Italian-American meal with friends—my Mom would hear me come in the door and, from her bedroom, shout out “Hi! Did you have garlic?” It was uncanny.
Now, modern scientists tell us that the population is divided, roughly, into thirds: weaker tasters, normal tasters, and super-tasters. They say that more women than men are super-tasters, which I believe. But I buy the overall theory, too; after one meal and some food talk with a group of new people, I usually have the diners (though they never know it!) divided in my mind into three discrete groups.
There is also no question in my mind that if you had the good luck to be born with a super-palate, you have been handed a golden opportunity to become a great taster. But I add to that: you have to work at it. If you work hard at it, and a weak palate works hard at it…you’ll be a better taster. However, if the weak palate really wants to be a “taster,” and if you don’t even care…the work of the weak palate might propel him or her beyond you as a taster!
And what is this “work?”
I actually learned a lot of what I know about food tasting…from the discipline of wine tasting. One of the questions I’m most often asked is: “How can you taste 100 wines a day and make critical judgments? My palate gets confused after four or five wines,” they say…which is what the scientists tell us about our capacity for differentiation.
But those who are getting confused about the wines are doing exactly what my prosciutto colleague did: they are having a subjective, personal, impressionistic response to the tasting item at hand.
The great taster does not do that.
If I’m tasting, say, 100 dry Rieslings…I have myself prepared to taste each wine with respect to a series of evaluative criteria, a series I’ve developed over the years after doing this thousands of times. As I taste, I ask myself these things ABOUT EACH WINE (partial list):
1) What can I tell from the color?
2) The nose: general? specific? aggressive? subtle? fruity? stony?
3) What is the acid level?
4) What is the alcohol level?
5) Is the wine rich, lean, or in-between?
6) Does the taste linger? How long?
7) Are all elements in balance?
This “asking” is a scientific process. It is a mechanical probe. I am trying to leave behind all goo-gah, dewy-eyed response. I am trying to function like a computer.
Well, damnit, of course off the bat some little voice inside is going to say some variation of “yum!” or “yuck!” But the professional taster supresses that voice. Have you seen the new “it” tasters on the Cracker Barrel Cheddar Cheese commercials? They are impassive while they taste, slow and steady. OK, they’re actors…but someone gave that production the right idea!
After I’ve gathered all the “objective” criteria that my palate can provide…only then am I on to the task of synthesizing it all and coming to a conclusion about the value of the product. Frankly, that conclusion is usually not too far from the initial impression I have of a product. But the “scientific method” enables me to repeat this process over and over and over again. Without it, I get to wine #77 and I say…”I can’t do this anymore!” With it, I get to wine #77 and I say…”OK, let’s gauge the acid, the alcohol, the balance…”And I’m off.
It’s a check list that never lets me down. It’s a process. And the process insures that wine #77 is no more challenging than wine #1.
So let’s take this story from the other end…what do you do if you want to become a great taster?
1) Taste a lot. Taste a lot, especially, in the categories you’d like to master.
2) Start working immediately on developing your criteria for each item that’s tastable. This is a creative process: use your imagination to arrive at the factors that seem to make a difference. If you can’t get started, consult books, or the internet, to see how others are talking about your product. Let’s say it’s chocolate…you’ll find comments about the couverture, the ganache, the snap, etc. Pay attention to those things as you taste…but develop your own criteria too. (Let’s say you LOVE something crazy about one piece of chocolate e.g. “if I let it melt on my palate, it feels like smooth organic peanut butter!” Whatever. But NEVER forget it!)
3) And that brings us to memory. Some people have a better capacity for this than others. But it is desperately important that you use every bite to lay down a sense-memory of whatever it was you bit (or swilled!) None of the above do any good at all if you can’t remember the experience. Slow down as you taste, and give memory its due.
OK…let’s go back to the prosciutto table. I’m sure my friend has tasted prosciutto before…but I can tell, through discussing this morsel, that he hadn’t established a set of criteria for himself, and hadn’t really carried the memory of past great prosciutti, or past bad ones.
To me, I could see trouble right away in the prosciutto. I knew it was pre-sliced, and I could see the problems as I unwrapped it. Not only did the slices cling together (preventing the gorgeous presentation of “islands” of prosciutto on a platter, not touching each other)…I could also see the dull sheen that pre-cutting, and waiting, created on each slice. (This tasting was for a video segment on the virtues of a home meat slicer for spontaneous slicing…to be aired on DRTV this Friday!)
The aroma was fairly neutral (great prosciutto smells like cheese, or nuts, or fruit, or sometimes smelly feet, or all of them! Something!)
The neutrality continued on the palate. What I got, mostly, was salt. And I love salt! But not this salty slice. This tasted like dead, salted meat. And, as you might guess from this description, the slice had none of the velvety-silky-sexy feel of great prosciutto. It was dry and leathery.
Yes, we tasted more. Yes, the other prosciutti were better…one of them, much better.
And yes…my friend agreed to the superiority of the successive hams…
…and took a giant step towards becoming a good prosciutto taster!
Photos Via: BigStockPhoto
