Marc Murphy’s Food 360: flavour is more than simply how it tastes

Flavour is so much more than taste. It’s smell. It’s texture and temperature. It’s the sounds around us as we tuck into a dish. And the influence of our expectations. That’s why, as TV chef Marc Murphy explores in his new podcast Food 360 (available now on iTunes and Acast), that expensive bottle of red tastes so incredible sipped on the balcony of a Spanish holiday villa, while the exact same bottle bought back home and sipped at the kitchen table just isn’t the same.

Some elements of flavour, then, are frustratingly subjective. But companies can take comfort in the fact that it isn’t an experience devoid of science either. Science explains why the salty fat that crisps up fried chicken sits perfectly on the palate with the acidity of the best champagne, and why the tannins in that bottle of red complement steak.

In fact, as fellow chef Gail Simmons tells Murphy, this is also an objective skill that can be learned. Judging food on glitzy TV shows has become a phenomenon off the back of just that, explains Simmons, with professional flavour aficionados studying the seasoning, preparation and cooking of a dish with honed precision.

And those “super tasters” among us might not even need their years in the kitchen, with some born with additional tastebuds and a genetic ability to experience flavour more intensely.

Far more complex, then, than how a dish simply ‘tastes’, flavour is multifaceted. If you want to enhance it? You’ll need to “pay attention”, sum up the experts.