There are foods and drinks that we typically serve hot, cold, or room temperature. They taste better in those forms… but why?
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The taste of food isn’t just about what your tongue senses. It also relies on your sense of smell. Depending on the temperature of your food, different volatile chemicals will come off of it and enter your nose, adding dimension to the flavour. Food that tastes better hot has volatiles that escape it at higher temperatures than food that tastes better cold.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons, but one specific example: there are certain components of food that melt at specific temperatures, which changes how we experience the flavor of that food.
The fat in tuna and the fat in chocolate both melt at something very close to human body temperature, which is said to be one of the reasons people enjoy them so much – they literally “melt in your mouth”
temperature can have an impact on texture, which can alter the way we perceive flavors. Eg. melted cheese vs. solid. Or liquid fats/oils on something like a hot burger vs. coagulated fats/oils on a cold one.
There are also receptors in your taste buds that are more sensitive to things at higher temperatures. So, a flavor is stronger when it’s warmer. Warm beer tastes more bitter than cold beer because those receptors are not as sensitive to the bitterness when it is cold.
Cold temperatures will make something taste less sweet. That’s why cold desserts, soft drinks, and cocktails get a *lot* of sugar added.
What you perceive as “taste” is not the result of your taste receptors alone, but that of everything you feel about the food: its smell, texture, temperature, and yes, also its actual taste.
Taste is mostly smell. If you don’t believe me, pinch your nose closed with your fingers and eat some stuff. That’s the amount of flavour detected by your tongue. Everything else is actually smells detected by your nose.
So how is your nose getting all that flavour info? It evaporates up into your sinuses from inside your mouth.
The hotter something is, the more and the faster it evaporates.
That’s the answer to your question:
– The food temp determines how much of which components get into your sinuses to be smelled
– the smelled components make up like 85% of what you think of as “taste”
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