How can the combined use of only 5 types of taste buds produce an effectively infinite number of tastes?
In: Biology
It doesn’t.
Your taste buds provide a limited set of combinations. Flavor, however, is much more complex than just taste (your gustatory system). It also includes your somatosensory system, which detects texture, temperature, and irritants (spicy!), as well as your olfactory system, which detects volatile aromatic molecules in your mouth. Your olfactory system can detect a *huge* number of different combinations (as shokalion points out). However, smell through your nose (orthonasal olfaction) has limited impact on flavor–it’s smell through the back of your throat (retronasal olfaction) that does the real work.
There’s a difference between taste and flavour.
Flavour is a combination of taste, and aroma, i.e. smell.
Taste is simply salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (savoury), whereas aroma is all the other notes you can think of. Banana, bacon, curry, chocolate, all that kind of thing.
This is why the trick of holding your nose is so effective at deadening your sense of taste. Because smell, aroma, is a massive, arguably the majority, of the sensation of flavour.
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