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They are specialized nerve endings looking for a specific type of chemical. When it senses it, it sends an electrical signal to your brain that it is being tickled by the thing it is supposed to detect. This is how our taste buds get fooled by things like mint. The nerve that is supposed to report “cold” is getting tickled by the mint, which is not actually cold.
Most of the actual taste that our brain processes comes from smell, and not the taste buds. If you pinch your nose, you can dull the taste of what is in your mouth.
If thing of the toddler toy where you put the shaped block in the corresponding shaped hole, that is how taste buds work. We have little specific shaped sensors on our tongues that go off when activated by the corresponding shape.
However, spicy is not a true flavor, it is a burning sensation caused by a chemical defense in certain plant species. We do not have taste receptors for spicy, it’s literally just use enjoying a masochistic response to chemical burns.
You have lots of specialized nerves all ready to send a signal to the brain. To send the signal, something has to switch them on. This is done by specialized surfaces on them that have a very specific shape, sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. When something with the correct shape happens to hit that surface, it activates and the nerve sends that signal off to the brain. You then taste whatever has been detected, some combination of salty, sweet, umami, bitter, or sour.
Capsaicin evolved in chilis to inhibit microbial growth and stop pests from eating the fruit and dropping the seeds on the ground. Inside your mouth, capsaicin reacts with thermoreceptors that tell your brain how hot (thermally, as in temperature) the thing you’re eating is. The effect of this interaction is that your brain thinks your mouth is several degrees hotter than it really is.
Generally the way senses work is through receptors. A receptor “receives” a signal, that signal goes to your brain, and your brain interprets is.
When you eat something that binds to the “sour” receptors on your tongue, those receptors activate, send a signal to your brain, and your brain goes “That’ signal means it’s sour” and it tastes sour to you
Remember, nothing in reality is “inherently” sweet, sour, or red, or blue, or hot or cold, or any attribute we apply to things based on our sense. That’s just how our brains interpret them. An alien could have a brain that, when presented with the signal our brains turn into “red”, turns it into “blue”, and everything we see as red, they would see as blue. The object has no “actual” color in reality, it is just absorbing and reflecting different wavelengths of light and the brain of the observer determines what those reflected wavelengths look like to them.
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