01

When you have a cold and stuffy nose, do you feel that a lot of food you eat becomes tasteless?

Or when eating fruit candy, pinch your nose and you will only feel the sweetness, just like eating white sugar. After you let go of your nose, various aromas will come up. This Candy tastes good.

That’s because more than 75% of our overall feeling about food comes from the sense of smell.

So a great gourmet eats not with his mouth, but with his "nose".

02

Our olfactory system is divided into two senses, prenasal and retronasal.

The nose is the smell you smell directly before eating. This is very simple and direct, and most people can detect it and distinguish good from bad.

However, the post-nasal smell is relatively subtle, and it is difficult for ordinary people to detect it in detail.

There are two secret holes leading to the nasal cavity above our throat. They are usually closed.

When we fully chew the food, under a certain oral temperature, the food will release the full aroma. When swallowing, the two small holes will open, and the aroma will flow into it. Captured by olfactory cells and passed to the brain.

When you eat something good, you will unconsciously make a sound of "Hmm~~". In fact, your brain is causing your nostrils to exhale more air, allowing more post-nasal aroma to enter the nasal cavity.

Therefore, "Hmm~~" when eating something good is the same language all over the world.

03

I remember Liu Run once told a story.

He attended a dinner party in a Chaozhou restaurant that has been famous in China for decades.

This dinner was particularly grand, and the director of Shanghai Shanghai Cuisine Culture Research Institute, Master Fu, was invited.

There was a soup at the dinner. As soon as Liu Run took a sip, he thought it was so delicious and started to praise it.

I saw Master Fu taking a sip of the soup very seriously, tasting it for a while, and said: The top aroma of this soup is enough, but the tail aroma is a little less. ?

Liu Run felt that his face was a little hot and he spoke too early.

Master Fu continued: When you enter the mouth of this soup, the fresh fragrance soaks your heart and mind, but it dissipates immediately and there is no sweetness. ?

If you add a little olive, the fragrance will slowly linger in your mouth.

For olives, you can use fresh green olives, or more importantly, you can use small stone olives.

In winter, you can also replace the olives with black garlic, which will turn the delicate fragrance into a warm and fragrant feeling. ?

This is probably an expert in "eating with the nose".

04

Before we had the concept of pre-nasal and post-nasal tastes, we might have ignored the most important part of food, let alone distinguishing the differences in these flavors.

The more we understand now, the higher the resolution of our senses will become, and the granularity of the various feelings we can taste will become more and more detailed.

Spending the same price and eating the same thing, the higher the sensory resolution, the higher the enjoyment.