Eli5: Why do certain food tastes compliment each other while others don’t?
In: Biology
You have different taste receptors in your tongue. Salt, Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Umami (meaty savoury flavour).
Your sense of smell is critical, it can detect 10,000 or so different aromas and smelling food we like sets us up to eat, activating production of saliva and digestive juices. Aroma accounts for around 80% of what you experience as flavour.
Hearing is important too, crunchy things aren’t so appealing if you can’t hear them crunch.
Vision is important because it also creates a desire to eat and we like to see a variety colours and shapes. If presented with a homogeneous grey pool of liquidised roast chicken, potatoes, vegetables etc it will be a lot less appealing. We have also learned to be attracted to golden coloured foods – fried, toasted etc probably due to the easy calorie payoff.
The composition and temperature of the food is also really important. Oils create a silky mouth feel and helps flavours to combine and be experienced together but cold grainy fat is usually (initially) unpleasant.
Our survival-related genetic pre-dispositions also condition us to prefer certain things. People tend to enjoy sweet fatty things which provide a lot of easy calories but will be less keen on blue food which could signify its rotten.
All those things in combination contribute to your experience of eating something – there are a lot of moving parts there and this makes it complicated but also allows us to enjoy almost limitless culinary delights.
Individual foods tend to go together when they enhance the same aroma aspects as each other and this happens when two foods include the same or similar groups of chemicals which give rise to the aroma.
Meals tend to be good when they combine to stimulate several of those senses in one sitting.
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