Counterfeit brandy

Szalony kucharz via Wikipedia Commons

In the 15th and 16th centuries, working out the alcohol percentage of wine was no easy feat. For ease, the authorities taxed alcohol according to volume rather than percentage, making importing gin a better deal than wine or beer. And so, naturally, the merchants looked for a loophole, and they found one – or so they thought: distil down the wines, and add the water back in after passing customs. It seemed foolproof. But they had not accounted for one thing: warming wine changes its chemistry. Volatile chemicals are lost, other chemicals – esters, acids, aldehydes – decompose, or undergo reactions. When the merchants rediluted their wine, it tasted different. Wrong. “brandewijn”, or “burnt wine”, they called it, and nowadays, we call it brandy.

The sweet taste of unknown

© TWDK

I eat my artichoke-aubergine breakfast dish (my vegetarian take on Antigua and Barbuda’s traditional aubergine saltfish breakfast), and take a swig of water. It tastes sweet. But then, I’m not surprised by that. Water always tastes sweet after eating artichoke.

Why is that?

It turns out scientists don’t actually know. The theory goes that cynarin, an acid found in artichoke, inhibits our sweetness receptors. When washed away (e.g. by a nice glass of water), the sweet receptors reactivate. Just as if you taste a really sugary drink and then slightly sugary one, the slightly sugary one won’t taste sweet at all by contrast (try it!), the same thing happens here: your brain goes crazy now the receptors is no longer inhibited, and interprets the water as sweet.

Baby Tastes (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #22)

Do your baby’s tastes depend on what you ate when they were in the womb?

Apparently, you can taste foods in amniotic fluid and breast milk – certain distinct flavours such as carrot, vanilla, mint and garlic, anyway. These flavours can be detected in breastmilk as little as half an hour after eating, and adults can even smell and identify them.

Cheese

This guest article was written by Maxwell Holle from the University of Illinois.

A simple glass of milk holds the potential to become hundreds of different types of cheeses with a variety of different flavours. But with so many diverse flavours and styles, how can we identify an off-flavour?

Image by corinnabarbara from Pixabay.

 

What is cheese?

Cheese is milk that we force into a gel by either acid, heat, or enzymes. While making cheese, we try to remove as much water as possible, which also means losing some milk proteins. The simplest cheeses stop here and are known as fresh cheeses; they have a relatively salty and neutral taste. However, most cheeses take on their characteristic flavours and smells during the ageing and ripening stage, where diverse groups of microorganisms get involved. These microorganisms generate the characteristic flavours of some of our favourite cheeses.