Taste Experiments - Thomas

Sweet/Sour

Water + simple syrup: This tastes like a single note, it has round, closed feeling. It is perceptibly sweet but it tastes like its holding something back, as though I'm just feeling it rather than actually tasting it.

Water + lemon juice: This is a very open taste, it spreads throughout my mouth activating in different ways depending on area. It has a sort of "back-end" a lingering, ringing taste in the back of my mouth.

Water + lemon juice + simple syrup: This has a combination of opening and closing, the simple roundness of syrup covers up and fills in the sour contrasts of the lemon.

Sweet/Salty

Caramel w/o salt: Again, like the simple syrup, it has a simplicity and roundness, but maybe a bit more of a warmness and depth to it, but it feels resistant, inaccessible, smooth, thick.

Caramel with salt: The salt opens up and airs out the caramel, activating regions that were otherwise dormant. It's like turning on a light in a dim room and suddenly you can see the character of the furniture.

Chocolate

86%: Cool and deep, granular. After chewing, it starts to feel almost like very very fine grain sand. Earth, but a purified, rarified earth. Not a mundane earth.

60%: Starts to have a thickness and smoothness that fills in the granularity, making it a fudgier, denser feel. A sort of berry sweetness starts to emerge.

33%: The sweetness and creaminess overcomes the dark earth as the primary flavor.

Carrots

Carrots turn out to be interesting in that the flavor is only released through chewing. The smaller chunks needed to be chewed less, so I didn't taste them as much. The carrot juice is the most concentrated, but the flavor is different because it is not activated by chewing. It may be a graniness, fiberiness that is missing in the carrot juice. Carrot juice is surprisingly smooth.

Savory/Salty

 Pure tomato juice tastes very metallic, shiny, clanging to me. The minerality of salt somehow dulls the metallic aspects while bringing out the warmth and brightness of tomato.

Milk

 The biggest jumps were from fat-free to 1% and from Whole to Half and Half. Fat-free has very little flavor and very little substance. 1% is still not very sweet, but the difference in feel is drastic - there is an immediate substance and filminess that sits in your mouth that is totally absent in the fat free milk. From whole to half and half, there is a huge difference in sweetness. I wouldn't describe sweet as the main flavor of whole milk, more a smooth, enveloping fattiness. the half and half keeps that but adds a high note of sweetness that cuts through at the top of my mouth.

Salts

The only salts that really jumped out to me were the smoked one, which, true to its word, tastes like smoke - charred, warm, gray, cloudy. The other was the sulphury one, which tasted like poorly hardboiled eggs. Sulphur invades the nose like shock troops and expels everything else there until the empire collapses moments later leaving devastation.