The taste testers: sampling the food we eat

‘I get a cheesy smell off it.”

“It’s sweaty as well.”

“I’m getting sour and fat smells.”

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The Testing Booths at the Food Industry Development Dept, Teagasc Food Research Centre. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times

A group of people are clustered around a long table, sniffing samples of meat from plastic cups, and then tasting, chewing, and marking how they would rank its fat content from one to 100 – not a pleasant job at 11 in the morning.

“Drink some water and we’ll do the same with sample 215,” instructs Carol Griffin, their trainer. “You’ll probably need crackers as well after that.”

The group eat crackers and start again on the next cup, smelling its contents.

“That one’s sweeter.”

“Now that’s actually unpleasant.”

The group around the table is the first sensory panel to be trained at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Dublin for the recently formed Sensory Food Network Ireland. This is a network bringing together 10 organisations to allow companies and researchers easy access to sensory expertise.

The panel members were selected for their abilities to distinguish tastes and flavour. They are being trained to identify and agree on the sensory attributes of different meats – tenderness, flavours, aromas – so they can test and rate meats and meat products. They have already been trained for beef and pork. Today it’s lamb.

They are a diverse mix, including a chef, a cleaner, homemakers, students, an IT administrator, a food safety manager and menu designer, an artist and book illustrator.

The group discusses what are “gamey” and “livery” flavours. They have tasted venison that morning but there is a consensus that this wasn’t as “gamey” as expected. It’s decided that they need to taste pheasant, so they can use that taste as a standard to rank gamey flavours.

“They need to operate as a calibrated instrument,” explains Griffin. “They really have to get together as a group. During training we are calibrating everyone so when they are describing a piece of meat as grassy or tender or fatty, they are describing it in the same way. Our job is to find the standard.”

Griffin has issued a number of rules they must follow for their weekly sessions. No curries the night before, no morning coffee, no strong deodorants or shower gels, no aftershave, no perfume, no lipstick, no strong-tasting toothpaste, no smoking.

As the session continues there is a lot of good-humoured banter about having to eat liver, and the day they tasted 16 pork samples in a row. An audible groan goes up anytime pork is mentioned.

Not everyone is suitable to be a sensory tester, as many people actually have an inability, or reduced ability to distinguish the basic tastes.

“We think that we perceive all the flavour from a food or drink from our tongue, but this isn’t true,” says sensory scientist Emily Crofton. “Our perception of a food and drink involves all five senses – we see it, feel it, smell it, taste it and hear it. In fact, our tongues can only perceive five basic tastes – sweet, sour, salt, bitter and a savoury taste called umami. The flavour we perceive in food actually comes from our nose, through our sense of smell.

“Another important sense is hearing. For example, the sound of the crack of chocolate when you bite into a Magnum ice-cream is not part of the flavour, but certainly enhances the experience of eating it.”

Vision also affects how we perceive flavour. “If one food is darker in colour than another, it can make someone think that the flavour is going to be stronger, even if there is no actual difference in the flavour,” says Crofton.

To ensure that vision doesn’t influence testing, much of the panel’s tasting and marking is done in booths where red lights prevent them distinguishing what they are eating. The booths have been built around a kitchen. Small hatches in each booth are opened and closed quickly as intern Una McDonnell passes through the samples she has just cooked and cut.

There is total silence, bar the scratching of pens and sniffing sounds as the panel smell, taste and rank the pieces of lamb they have been given.

Samples come wrapped in tinfoil on paper plates with disposable forks. Each has a code.

Cooking meat samples exactly right is incredibly important, explains Griffin. “It’s cooked to a certain protocol, to an internal temperature. There is a resting period. Then it is cut so that everything looks the same, wrapped and coded. Random three-digit codes are used because if we used one, two, three, four, five, people might actually think that five was stronger. That’s how easy we are to influence.”

Today’s results will allow trainers Griffin and Carmel Farrell to see if the panel are all identifying different attributes of lamb in the same way, that they recognise the same metallic taste, or “grassy” or “livery” flavour intensities. If not there will be further training to ensure they work as that “calibrated instrument”.

The panel is already being used by food companies and researchers. Their jobs will include helping companies understand what consumers like about a product, and to benchmark products against competitors.

“An example might be that somebody supplying beef to Tesco Ireland wants to prove to them their beef is much more tender and full of flavour than the four competitors,” says Griffin. “We would do blind tasting. We would pull apart their product and the four competitors’, and give them black-and-white results based on the attributes, telling them who’s scoring where.”

They also plan to use the panel for “difference testing”. “If somebody is planning to produce a lower-salt sausage, they don’t want consumers to taste the difference,” says Griffin. “Because we’ve tested and trained our people we know what level of salt they can detect and by giving them samples at different times we can test if the difference can be picked up or not.”

So what’s next for the panel after lamb? “Don’t tell them yet, but we’re going back to pork . . .”

A bluffer’s guide to taste

• The sensory receptors for taste are contained in our taste buds which are located on the tongue, mouth and larynx. Our taste buds can only perceive five basic tastes - sweet, sour, salt, bitter and " umami". "Supertasters" have a greater number of taste buds and experience more intense taste sensations.
• Hypogeusia or ageusia is the reduced ability or inability to detect basic tastes.
• Flavour is a complex combination of taste and smell, and can be affected by how a food or drink feels in the mouth, or how it looks.
• The flavour we perceive in a food or drink is perceived through our nose. That is why when you have a cold and your nose is blocked food doesn't taste so good.
• We "eat with our eyes". Food colour has been shown to influence people's perception of food flavour. We can be fooled into thinking a diluted drink is stronger than it actually is by adding food colouring to it. White wine coloured like red wine can fool the senses.
• The shape of a product has been shown to affect how we perceive flavour. Rounded shapes are associated with sweeter tastes, and angular shapes with sour/bitter tastes.
• Humans have an innate dislike of sour foods, which from caveman time have been historically associated with poisonous foods. We are born liking sweetness.