Why do cooked foods typically taste better warm (right after cooked) than cool
In: Chemistry
This is probably a highly subjective topic without a definitive answer. You can probably find examples of cooked food that taste better cold, and different people might have different preferences.
That being said, one possible reason for more intense flavor of warm foods is that the fats, which carry a lot of flavor, are more liquid when they are warm, and can carry the flavor compounds to your taste buds more easily than in cold food, where the fats are more solid. More generally, all chemical and biological processes become faster at higher temperatures. So the process of flavor compounds activating the taste buds might be faster and more efficient with warm foods than cold foods.
When you “taste” foods, beyond the basic five tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, savory, sour) you are actually smelling them. Which is why food generally tastes blah whenever you have a cold. Whatever the tastes of that food are, those flavor compounds are moving from your mouth back into your nose where your olfactory nerves are activated.
Warm/hot food has more energy in it, so those compounds are more active and move more readily into the nasal cavity.
Coffee actually gets more acidic as it cools due to the ongoing degradation of one of the acids produced when it’s made. I imagine that there are similar chemical reactions that occur in other foods. Reactions involving fats, for example, often begin during cooking and continue as time goes on.
In this sense, it’s better to think of these changes as results of the cooking rather than the cooling.
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