Word: umami
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reassurance. Take, for instance, the grilled baby pike served with olive rice (pictured above). The rice is roasted to give it a pleasant crunchiness and the flavor of the piquant fish, like many of Iggy's dishes, is that marvelous interplay between sweet and salty that the Japanese call umami. Not all dishes at Iggy's live up to this transcendent promise (on the night we visited, the dessert was a disappointingly boring fig tiramisu). But there were hints of greatness in the light-as-a-cloud gazpacho sorbet served as a palate cleanser, and in the charcoal-grilled Wagyu...
...Bartoshuk, a Yale University professor who specializes in genetic variation in taste perception. The supertasters, she believed, had an anatomical and biological basis for their elevated taste response. Scientists have long known that different areas on the tongue map to different taste sensations. Bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and savory (umami) all have their place on the tongue, and some researchers are now arguing that calcium-sensitive sites merit their place, as well. It makes sense, then, that having more tastebuds corresponds to a greater gustatory response in supertasters.The emerging field of hedonics, the study of gustatory pleasure, is determined...