I just saw an image of a plastered croissant and thought it wouldn’t taste the same. It would still taste good. I think. But i feel like it won’t taste the same. Is this true? Banana mash and just banana doesn’t taste the same right? Why is that? i know temperature heavily influences taste and i sort of understand why that is but it would be helpful if someone with expert information on this just explained that as well. Thanks
In: Biology
I’m hesitant to say I have “expert information” but here’s at least a little bit of info:
Flavors are caused by chemicals. The taste buds on your tongue are built to detect specific chemicals and then send information through nerves to your brain. In theory, food made of the same chemicals in the same proportions should have the same flavor.
The tongue is also a muscle. It has blood flow, it can be moved and flexed, it can get too hot or too cold, and it can feel pain and be injured. So there are other nerve signals involved unrelated to flavor as well.
When food has a different texture, like say mashed banana instead of whole banana, it interacts with your tongue differently. Mashed banana is going to touch more of your tongue at once, and have less contact with the roof of your mouth and teeth since it doesn’t require as much chewing. This alone can change the eating experience but then also consider that the process of mashing the banana could have added air to it, or released water stored in the cells of the fruit, or the energy from mashing could have heated very tiny bits of it so that now 0.000001% of it is “cooked” and changed the composition of its sugars. Or the container or tools that were used to mash it could have imparted some flavor (think how canned soda tastes different from bottled). Then on top of all of that, consider how much of flavor is actually determined by your nose and sense of smell – smell is caused by particles in the air. A mashed banana may release more or less aroma than a whole one, and thus when it’s in your mouth more or less of it can reach your nose and change how the flavor is perceived that way.
So flavor is actually a really complex phenomenon and all sorts of things can affect it. But on top of all that, there’s also some psychology at play. Why does a mashed banana seem less appetizing than a whole one to us? It could be because a mashed banana seems like it has already been chewed. It can evoke memories or thoughts of vomit, or we can associate it with “baby food” and feel like it’s not what we should be eating. In the croissant example you may have a preconceived notion of what makes “a croissant” and the plastered one simply “doesn’t look right”. Your brain may feel like it’s just not food because it’s not familiar. Consider how weird peanut butter must seem if you only ever ate whole peanuts.
When you eat a whole banana, you taste the outside first and the the inside if that makes sense. If you mash it up, you mix those flavors and create a new one, however close the original flavors are.
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