The Flavor of Botanical Cuisine (I)

let's talk about the taste of plant-based food, which is what the sense of taste feels. Among the five recognized flavors, four are particularly prominent in fruits and vegetables, sweet, sour, bitter and fresh.

fruit: people pursue beauty, while fruit pursues sweetness. Sweetness is the most important factor of delicious fruit, and its main component is sugar, which is the main product of photosynthesis. Immature fruits often store sugar as tasteless starch, and when they are ripe, starch turns into sugar, making the fruit more attractive. At this time, the acid content of the fruit tends to decrease, so the fruit appears sweeter.

vegetables: most vegetables are fresh and have no sweetness. some vegetables belong to fruits and will become sweet when they are ripe. For example, when bitter gourd matures, it will also become sweet. Of course, we usually eat bitter gourd as a vegetable when it is young and tender. Some vegetables belong to the roots of plants and store a lot of starch and fibrous substances. During storage, some starch is converted into sugar, which is slightly sweet.

cereal: cereal food. We usually eat seeds, and the endosperm part contains a lot of starch. Only when chewing, starch is decomposed into sugar by salivary amylase, can it be tasted by us.

Plants gather the organic acids in fruits in vacuoles, which can be used as alternative energy, chemical defense or waste metabolism.

Because of the variety of organic acids in plants, including citric acid, malic acid, tartaric acid and oxalic acid, and each has a different taste, we feel that the fruit with sour taste is more intense.

Bitterness usually occurs only in vegetables and seeds (such as coffee and cocoa beans), which contain chemical defense substances such as alkaloids.

After thousands of years of efforts, our ancestors tried to alleviate the bitterness of some crops, such as lettuce, cucumber, eggplant and cabbage.

Of course, some close relatives of cabbage and bitter gourd are actually loved because of their bitter taste.

moreover, the ancients also called bitter gourd "not spreading one's own bitterness to other things", which means that frying with other dishes will not affect the flavor of other dishes. In fact, it is because this alkaloid molecule is large, insoluble in water and volatile, so it appears that bitter gourd has both virtue and virtue, and is called "gentleman's dish".

say sweet, sour, and bitter, and then fresh. Freshness is also a kind of taste, and there are taste receptors for umami on our tongue. The delicious amino acids full of saliva are the characteristics of protein's animal food, but some fruits and vegetables also contain a lot of glutamic acid, which is the main component of monosodium glutamate. Among them, the more eye-catching species are tomatoes, sweet oranges and many kinds of seaweed.

The umami flavor in mushrooms is mainly some flavor amino acids such as glutamic acid or aspartic acid, and flavor nucleotides such as inosinic acid and guanylic acid.