Salt sensory evalutation
photo by Val

Preparation:

Videos I watched this week:
Anatomy of a Scene: Spike Lee re: Da 5 Bloods
Why Regenerative Organic? Patagonia, part 1
Seeds of Our Ancestors, Seeds of Life with Winona LaDuke 
A Matter of Taste, episode of Food:  A Delicious Science
Readings things week:
Intro to Food Justice Scholar-Activism and Histories of Black Food Justice
first half of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland

Resources/Required Reading:

An Introduction to Flavor and its Evaluation for Crop Scientists_TESC_Sept2020
FlavorEvaluationCropScientists_Table1
FlavorEvaluationCropScientists_Table2

Lab Practice: 5 Basic Flavor and Intensity Calibration

#1b: Foodoir: Your Story of Tasting Place

“The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are, and to tell stories about where they’ve been (xii).

The Old South is a place where food tells me where I am.  The Old South is a place where food tells me who I am. The Old South is where food tells me where we have been. The Old South is where the story of our food might just tell America where it’s going (xvii).
’We need a blueprint as individual and as a people’ (11).
‘What’s the best thing you ever cooked?’ I asked my mother.
‘A little black boy named Michael; I cooked him long and slow,’ she replied (13).
George Washington Carver once said, ‘If you love something enough it will give up its secrets to you’ (17).
MICHAEL TWITTY, THE COOKING GENE

I grew up in a family that had a lot of family recipes and recipes handed down for generations. Many of my childhood memories are based around eating and cooking and baking. I loved my grandmas pecan fingers that she would make during Christmas time. I now have all of her recipes, and now make pecan fingers at Christmas. They bring back such happy memories and the tastes remind me so much of her. Any time I pull out one of her recipe cards written in her calligraphy it brings me back to happy time during my childhood and I don’t think there is anything better than that.

Week 3 Rapid Sensory Evaluation

This week I put together my rapid sensory solutions, salt, sour, sugar, bitter, and umami. This weekend I then diluted the main concentrates for each taste at three different concentration levels. I then put the cups under a red light and tasted each one. For me the bitter and umami didn’t have much taste at the beginning it was mostly an after taste for me, one that I did not like on either. There were just one or two that I was not exactly sure on, but I feel I did a fairly good job at picking them out. I would think that it might had to deal with the fact that even I could not really see the content I had set the cups up myself. I think it might have been a little different if I was not the one setting up cups.

I found it very interesting that I had a hard time with the salt and bitter distinction, mostly it was the medium concentration I mixed up on. I feel if I had more time and someone else to set up my test I feel like I could really do better.