• If you want to hone your tasting skills, you have to practice, practice, practice. And maybe buy a bushel of different apples and try to describe each variety in as much detail as possible.... [url]
• A fascinating study of Asian and Western food recipes shows that Western dishes tend to pair ingredients with similar flavors, whereas Asian recipes don't. So the "sweet and sour" sauce is only on an Asian menu, but this study goes into far more depth than that. (And there's a free article on taste, sponsored by Ajinomoto.) [url]
• The hottest pepper on the planet goes to the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion with an average Scoville Heat Unit value of 1.2 million. Some individual peppers from this plant have hit 2 million Scoville heat units, and this research will allow hot sauce companies to scientifically claim to use the hottest known peppers. [url]

• Japanese scientists have studied the properties of miraculin -- the glycoprotein from the West African plant Richardella dulcifica that makes sour things taste incredibly sweet (for up to an hour). It works best in an acidic environment to bind your taste receptors, and unfortunately, the FDA considers it a food additive and has not approved its use as an artificial sweetener. [url]
• Some folks are investigating "Pine mouth" syndrome -- the phenomenon where a metallic aftertaste lingers in your mouth for days after eating pine nuts. The effect was first documented in 2001, but more cases are being reported and various food agencies are trying to track down the cause. [url]
• There are over 600 flavor compounds that combine to create the taste of chocolate. However, humans can recognize the aroma of chocolate by only 25 of those volatile flavors. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.

"People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren't much fun to eat," said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university's Food and Brand Lab.

When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding.