Why is food more fragrant when it’s hot rather than when it’s cold?
In: Chemistry
Not a chemistry/anatomy buff, but here goes:
Smells are like tiny little flavor bubbles (particles) that bounce around in the air until you breathe them in and they bounce around up your nose until they hit your smell detector (olfactory nerve). In order for your smell detector to detect smells, you need moisture, which exists in your nose as mucus (snot).
When the flavor bubbles hit your snot, it gets turned into signals for your brain (neurotransmitters).
But the thing is that when you put that snot moisture together with heat, the flavor bubbles bounce around faster, and the more they bounce around the more you can smell them.
So hot smells are bouncing around faster than cold smells, plus hot smells have more moisture to carry the flavor particles through the air and into your nose, and that’s why you smell hot things easier than cold things.
Think about water, when you boil it steam rises. In food a similar thing happens, the food heats up and lets off
“Steam” in the form of fragrance.
Scientifically speaking fragrance is basically molecules being given off by the food when you heat most things up the molecules in them move faster, colliding with one another and ultimately breaking off the original item.
Smell is actually tiny molecules transported on the air, to get a strong smell you either need a molecule that the body reacts to strongly (like those in stink bombs) or you need more molecules. As you heat something up you give it energy and the energy can liberate the molecule either directly into the air or transported in water vapour.
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