Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with taste

Help us find some musical compromise

dickasso — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:03:57 -0800

She thinks I'm a music snob, I think she listens to overcommercialised crap, what can we enjoy together? I find myself, for the first time ever, going out with a girl with whom I have very little in common musically.. She basically likes pop R&B, and I like a whole load of stuff but not that.

I'm absolutely certain that there is some interesting, well crafted, critically acclaimed work happening in the R&B genre like there is in every other one - I just have no idea where to start looking. So, as a starting point, what can I listen to that will get me to like (some) R&B? I'm in the UK and on Spotify so I should be able to find and listen to most of what's suggested pretty easily.

Plan B, maybe there's some stuff out of (or on the edge) of that genre that you think she and I might both like?

Her taste list provided for the purposes of this question: Akon, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, Sean Paul, Keri Hilson. So basically, pop R&B.

My taste kind of circles around it: indie rock, folk, blues, old soul (and some new), funk, afrobeat, electrotango, a range of electronica (boards of canada to orbital, shpongle, etc) and old-school hip-hop.

We both like Public Enemy era gangsta rap - but I can't listen to that all the time - and she kind of likes (and I really like) Maya Azucena.

Help? :)

Why do I crave sweets when I can't taste them?

otherwordlyglow — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:25:01 -0800

I've lost my sense of smell/taste because of sinus congestion. Why do I still crave sweets after a meal? For the past few days I haven't been able to smell much of anything and only taste very faintly, if at all due to the effects of a severe cold/flu. Why is it then that after I finish a meal, a meal that I can't even taste, I start looking around for the leftover Halloween candy? It doesn't seem like it's just out of habit but I really seem to crave something sweet after a meal even though when I eat the sweet, I can't taste that either. Somehow that satisfies the craving but how does my brain know I've eaten the sweet if I can't taste it? This has happened before when I've temporarily lost my sense of smell and I've never understood the underlying basis sensory processing. It's always seemed like such a waste to eat dessert to fulfill a craving but not even enjoy it! Could I blindfold myself and eat some tofu and trick my brain into thinking I had had a Reese's? Why doesn't that work?

Help me be more sensuous.

Pineapplicious — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:28:33 -0800

What suggestions do you have to help me be more sensuous? My sense perceptions are less refined than I would like. Some things I'd like to be able to do are to identify specific ingredients in the foods I am eating through taste, to distinguish one instrument from another in the music I am listening to, to judge distance more accurately by sight. As it is now, my perceptions are blunt. I taste food enough to know if I like it or not and can identify spiceness and can identify an overwhelming ingredient, but anything more subtle is lost on me. The same is true in music, distance, etc. I should mention that this lack of refinement is not due to a lack of experience nor any disfunction of my sense organs. What suggestions do you have?

Does dog meat taste like dogs smell?

stargell — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:38:47 -0800

Does dog taste like dogs smell? Not that I'd ever be tempted, but . . . dogs have a distinctive, not unpleasant odor. Is that what dog meat tastes like?

Tomatofilter: 2% chance I'm crazy; 98% chance something (good) is up with our country's tomatos.

jjjjjjjijjjjjjj — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:28:28 -0800

Tomato question: Did something happen late last Autumn that could have caused low-priced/budget tomatoes in (U.S.) fast-food restaurants and supermarkets to become radically better tasting? My perception of increased quality had a sudden onset, was not chain-specific, not geographically localized, and is shared by a handful of friends. (tl;drers, question is as stated above; the screed below is just the boring details. I suspect that help might come from food/soil/earth scientists, ag-economists, farmers, restaurant suppliers, or some other industry insider. Barring that, I suppose there's an outside chance that help might come in the form of two men in white coats dragging me to a rubber room.)

Last November a friend made a salad with sliced tomatoes that tasted amazing. I asked if she had sprung for some fancy brand or got them from a ritzy store; she said no, that they were the cheapest fresh type at the local chain supermarket. I didn't believe her but thought nothing of it at the time.

Within a few days I ordered a $2 burger at a fast food chain and was treated to a fucking amazing tomato there, as well. The floodgates then opened, and for, say, two weeks following, every tomato I ate (from whichever restaurant or grocery chain), tasted fantastic. At the time I chalked this up to some major regional (I live in St. Louis) supplier (Sysco?) stumbling onto a great shipment or something. Again, thought nothing further of it at the time.

At that point, and for the next 1.5 months, I traveled to: several New England states, Central Texas, and Northern California, eating at dives and fast-food joints for most every meal, and--I shit you not--in perhaps 70% of the meals I consumed was what I will call, for brevity "the SuperTomato".

I feel confident in the stark difference of the two; if you spend any amount of time eating tomatos, I'm betting that you'll agree that the difference between a "bad" and a "good" tomato is about as subtle as the difference between a whisper and a shout. The things I am describing taste like completely different things, it's not just a slight or stepwise increase in quality. I feel entirely confident that in a single-blind taste test I would correctly identify "SuperTomato" from "old-and-busted cheap tomato" 100 times out of 100.

My Question to food/soil/atmospheric scientists, agricultural economists, restaurant buyers and the like: Barring delusion on my part, what could be responsible for a flood of great tomatoes across the country at the bottom-end of the tomato pricing tier? This is either a real phenomenon, or the damndest case of my senses tricking me that I've ever seen.

Confirmation Bias? Maybe... hard to tell, obviously. But I've tried to screen for it at every step. I've asked, say, 8 friends and got 5 blank looks, 1 "yeah, now that you mention it", and 2 soul-piercing, thousand-yard stares of disbelief followed by a "You've noticed it, too?!"

I'm not a gastronome or a foodie or a "supertaster" or anything close. I'm just an average guy who eats average, cheap food. I have always eaten a normal amount of cheap store-bought tomatoes and until this happened, had uniformly normal reactions to them. I have no history of sensory hallucinations, no recent head-trauma, mental illness, or significant lifestyle changes. Please tell me what the fuck is up with my 'maters. Apologies for the length. Thanks.

Please make this Libirum stop spoiling my water

reverendjim — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:45:40 -0800

My doctor recently prescribed some Librium for awful stomach cramps. It seems that it is making all my food and drink now taste just terrible, like it's all got nutrasweet in it. I know the simple answer here is "just stop taking it", but that's really not an option. The Google is useless on this, and I really miss drinking water that tastes like water, and not water with some awful chemical in it. I guess, long question short: Is this the medication causing this or do I have a brain tumor?

Why will dogs eat these things?

roxie5 — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:25:47 -0800

Given their acute senses, why do dogs eat gross things? If smell and taste are related, and dogs have excellent senses of smell, then it would make sense to me that they would have acute senses of taste. Like, stronger taste buds than humans. Why, then, do they eat things that I can't imagine would taste good? My dogs really enjoy eating and/ or chewing things like stinky shoes, bark and cat poo (we keep them from it, but if we forget to close the door it's the first thing they go for). I would think one would only want to eat those if they had NO sense of smell/ taste. How can these things taste good to them?

Satisfy my salty-sweet tooth!

rachaelfaith — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:40:30 -0800

What are your favorite salty/sweet food combinations? While I generally crave salty things like chips, pretzels and crackers and rarely crave sugary snacks, I sometimes like to aim for a salty/sweet happy medium.

I love the taste of kettle corn, and I have recently begun to explore the deliciousness of sprinkling sea salt on baked goods. [Sea salt on homemade caramels? YUM.]

What else works? I'm looking for any food, not just snacks.

In a nutshell: Why doesn't Hazelnut/Almond flavoring taste like their namesakes?

for_serious — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:03:49 -0800

Vanilla extract tastes of vanilla bean... Mint extract is minty... Why are hazelnut and almond extracts so unlike hazelnuts and almonds? Snacking on almonds in the kitchen. Love almonds. Sniffing almond extract. Smells fantastic. Not seeing (smelling or tasting) the connection. Is it a different variety of almond? (And if so, why don't they sell those?)

Love hazelnut flavor (yum Frangelico), but it doesn't taste much like hazelnuts either. Sorry if this is silly, but I'm not so creative with the Google keywords. But you guys are smart! Please help!

Does caffeine have any affect on how you taste things?

voltairemodern — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:44:33 -0800

Does caffeine have any affect on how well (or poorly) you can taste things? I'm curious about whether I should seek out or avoid having caffeine on days that I anticipate wanting to taste things well, e.g. wine tastings, tasting new cheeses, going out for a gourmet meal.

Obviously I wouldn't want to drink a coke directly before tasting a wine. But I don't know whether, say, a coffee after lunch would modify my ability to taste that evening. Any studies done on this sort of thing? Personal anecdotes?

I need a ranch that won't drive me crazy...

Spyder's Game — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:31:05 -0800

I love ranch dressing. So does my wife. But we really only love the ranch dressing you find in restaurants.... So you go to a restaurant and order ranch. It's good. REALLY good. It's thin and creamy and has little bits of stuff (parsley?!) floating around in it. So you go to the store and want to buy some for yourself. But the only thing you can find is this THICK stuff that tastes NOTHING like the dressing you find in just about ANY restaurant. We have literally tried six or seven different types of "ranch" dressing off the shelves of our grocery store, and none of them taste anything like the restaurant dressing. They're all much thicker, and the taste is not even close. What gives? And where can we get ranch that tastes like restaurant ranch?

Examples of a few we've tried....Hidden Valley, Marie's, Hidden Valley Buttermilk, Lighthouse

no accounting for taste?

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:12:47 -0800

A question about a change in the way a woman tastes during oral sex. NSFW, obviously after a nice long jaunt of going down on my beautiful girlfriend, right before she comes she tastes different, sort of salty, tangier. i think it's awesome, but i'm curious about it too. does anyone know why this would be? my google-fu is not helping at all; i just keep finding erotic stories.

Aerogarden taste test!

tittergrrl — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:01:50 -0800

I live in an efficiency, and am thinking of getting an aerogarden to grow fresh vegetables and herbs. I hear they work well when it comes to growing, but I'm wondering how things taste in comparison with stuff from the supermarket.

Peer review for semen samples?

palindromic — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:56:45 -0800

A dispute between friends: is there any, say, peer-reviewed information out there about how a vegetarian diet impacts the taste of semen versus a meat-heavy diet? The more science-y, the better. I've found lots of articles that sort of state things like "Broccoli and asparagus make semen taste worse!" but where's the clinical tries? The double-blind controlled taste tests? Longitudinal follow up?

You can see the problem. Any reliable source would be appreciated!

Coffee taste out of plastic?

klangklangston — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:05:41 -0800

Coffee taste stain? My travel mug's lid is plastic, and has picked up the taste of old, bad coffee (from, no doubt, the new good coffee I drink each morning). How do I get it out? I have tried:
Soaking it in very hot water; scrubbing with dish soap; leaving it in a baking soda solution overnight.

I have found many, many webpages about taking the plastic taste out of the coffee—help me take the coffee taste out of the plastic.

Miracle fruit: your experiences, and where to buy in UK.

Zarkonnen — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:05:08 -0800

Miracle fruit: your experience, and recommendations on where to buy from in the UK. Ever since I heard of miracle fruit I've been wanting to try them out. But since I'm a bit wary of ingesting random berries bought over the Internet, I would like to hear of your experiences in acquiring and consuming them. Especially, I would like recommendations on reputable/tried places to buy them from in the UK.

What's up with my nipples?

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:03:06 -0800

A few weeks ago my boyfriend was sucking on my nipple and after about 30 seconds he said that he tasted something really sweet. Any idea what that might have been? He couldn't describe exactly what it tasted like, just sweetness. This happened when I was one or two weeks into my menstrual cycle and I just started my period a few days ago so I know I'm not pregnant. (I've heard that breast milk is sweet.) I'm 23, not on any medications, I've been sexually active for about six years and never been pregnant. I've never heard of this happening to anyone before and it hasn't happened to me since. What came out of my nipple?!

Electric Tea Kettle with no nasty taste?

media_itoku — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:31:03 -0800

Looking for an electric tea kettle that doesn't make the water taste like metal or plastic. Hoping to get away from the plastic taste imparted to tea water by plastic kettles, we opted for stainless steel. But now we're stuck with a nasty metal taste. We've tried a Hamilton Beach Cool Touch and a Toastess International from Target. No luck. I goog'd and found a Capresso Glass Water Kettle, but some of the Amazon reviews also make a big deal about bad taste.

Stove-tops are sadly not an option, since my husband has burned through three of them in the last year. Any recommendations for an auto-shutoff, non-nasty, electric kettle?

Whence comes sediment-free after-dinner coffee?

Mapes — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:31:07 -0800

Please tell me about the coffee I'm often served in restaurants after dinner (especially in hotels) and at event receptions (especially in hotels). It seems to be totally sediment free and tastes "cleaner" and simpler, perhaps less roasted, than your typical cup of drip coffee. Is it a special type of coffee, or is it prepared a special way? Does it have a name? Could it be percolated?

How can I put the sour back into the sourdough?

IndigoJones — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:07:23 -0800

Slight tangent from this question: the sourdough rises on command and leavens the bread, texture is fine - but the sour is gone. The best batch it ever made was on initial activation from the Ed Wood envelope somewhere over a year ago. Since then- not so much. In fact, not much at all.

Any advice on how to bring back that tangy feeling is what I'm looking for, and will be most grateful for same.

Are you guaranteed to be disgusted by 33% of the food on this list?

billtron — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:15:41 -0800

I once heard something along the lines of there being three foods in the world all of which hardly anyone enjoys the taste, even though many people enjoy at least two. One of them was peanut butter. Another might have been Vegemite. Where might I have heard this possibly false factoid? Any idea what the three items were?

This flu tastes terrrible

mzurer — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:59:56 -0800

I am on the trailing edge of a bout of flu, and I have a persistent bitter taste when I drink any fluids. Doesn't seem to be there when I eat things, only drink them. Has anyone else experienced this? When do I get my taste-buds back?

Can you show me some amazing literary descriptions of the pleasures of tasting food?

laumry — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:44:57 -0800

Can you show me some amazing literary descriptions of the pleasures of tasting and eating food? Hi all, happy new year!

I'd like to host a dinner party as a January blues-buster. I'm toying with different forms of invitation. One idea is to pirate any amazing descriptions I can find of *how* it feels to taste and eat good food. I'd like the descriptions to be vivid, feelgood and, perhaps, literary. Does anyone have any suggestions?

NB - I'm not really interested in descriptions of outlandish food, per se. I'm only really interested in descriptions of the sensation of tasting, eating and quaffing (potentially outlandish) food and drink. Bonus marks for descriptions that hit the other senses, too!

Does basil taste like pot for anyone else?

Anonymous — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 04:50:37 -0800

Does basil fried rice taste like marijuana to anyone else, or is it just me? Am I tasting the spice wrong? I just had basil fried rice at a Chinese/Thai restaurant called Fusion's, in Ashland MA. As far as I know, I've never had anything else with basil before, and to me the food tasted strongly like marijuana. Like, very, very "I just took a hit and I'm holding the smoke in my mouth" strongly. Meanwhile, the beef fried rice I ordered tasted just fine. My friends were dining with me and ate the remainder of the dish after I realized how bad it tasted, and they all think it tasted fine and not at all like pot. I came home and asked more friends, and they all agree that I'm nuts.

I'm thinking I vaguely remember a post about certain people mis-tasting certain foods, particularly spices, but I can only find posts on Miraculin. Any ideas? Does anyone agree?

Sweet breath when I cry

kristymcj — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:49:03 -0800

When I cry vigorously I get a sweet taste in my mouth. Why?