Why does the temperature of food affect how it tastes?

Question

There are foods and drinks that we typically serve hot, cold, or room temperature. They taste better in those forms… but why?

In: Other

Answer 1

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”