Training your palate

One taste to a glass

Take the tastes one at a time. A teaspoon of sugar in a glass of water, a quarter-teaspoon of salt in another, a pinch of citric acid or a teaspoon of lemon juice in a third.

The vanishing point

Halve it with water and taste again, until it gives you the slip. That vanishing point is your threshold. Labs weigh these to the milligram; for these three, a kitchen will do.

One glass, one taste

Match each glass to the taste it trains.

• sugar — sweet
• salt — salty
• lemon juice — sour
• unsweetened cocoa — bitter

Sugar for sweet, salt for salty, lemon juice for sour, unsweetened cocoa for bitter. One taste to a glass, and never two at once.

Bitter is the awkward one

Training labs weigh out pure caffeine for it; don’t try that at home. The FDA warns a single teaspoon of caffeine powder can hold as much caffeine as 28 cups of coffee, far too much to measure with kitchen spoons.

Raid the baking shelf

Stir a heaped teaspoon of unsweetened cocoa into a mug of hot water, no sugar, no milk. Pinch your nose, and the bite that’s left is mostly bitterness.

Spot the odd cup

Three cups: two of one coffee, one of another, at the same temperature. Find the odd one, the stranger at the table. That’s a triangle test, and you must pick even when you can’t tell.

Find the odd cup in each of six rounds.

Luck, or your palate

A guess is right a third of the time, so a single round proves nothing. Five right out of six rounds, though, happens by luck less than 2 times in 100.

Train on the larder

Your kitchen is a reference kit: a sharp green apple against a sweet red one is malic acid at two strengths. Very dark chocolate is bitter and drying at once. Sniff cinnamon, clove and nutmeg, eyes shut.

Same acid, different sugar

Lemon against orange trains you on what, exactly?

Answer: Citric acid at two very different sugar levels. Citric acid both times — the orange simply carries far more sugar, so the same acid reads sweeter. Name the food first; the coffee version comes easier.

Rest your palate

Tasting the same thing again and again has a cost. That’s palate fatigue. Keep sessions short, sip water between cups, and keep plain water crackers handy: dull company, but they worked on every food one lab tested.

What does palate fatigue actually do?

Answer: Each sip reports a little less: taste and smell both adapt to what they keep meeting. Short sessions, water and a plain cracker between cups.