Meeting Notes - July28th, 2008

Today our CHAT team held a blind taste-test of various foods, some more exotic, and others more traditional. As part of our discussions about how we experience food on a sensory level, we had participants try foods while blindfolded, and describe their thoughts and feelings along the way. People found that eating when not taking in visual information heightened other perceptions, such as taste, smell and texture.

Here are the foods from the tasting:

Burdock Root – a crisp, mild root vegetable, somewhat similar in taste to jicama, burdock has a long history of medicinal use in various cultures for its cleansing and diuretic properties.

Red Banana – sometimes also called Jamaican bananas, these little red cousins of the yellow banana we all grew up with was surprising for its sweetness and lack of starchiness.

Rutabaga – also called a yellow or Swedish turnip, the rutabaga is a cross between a cabbage and a turnip, with a sweet, mellow flavor. Prepared the same way as mashed potatoes, rutabagas were a very traditional root vegetable in Europe long before the potato arrived from the New World and supplanted its position as common starch source.

Feta Cheese – familiar to most people as the crumbled white stuff in a Greek salad, feta is Greece’s traditional brined cured cheese made from goat milk, sheep’s milk, or a combination thereof. Tasters expressed how complex they found the flavor to be, as well as how tasting it alone is a very different experience when not mixed with other ingredients.

Multigrain Crackers – served as a palate cleanser after the feta, the crackers were noted for their simplicity and bare-bones wheat flavor.

Dragonfruit (dried) – the fruit of a cactus native to Central/South America, dragonfruit was by far the most exotic flavor for the tasters. In dried form it was a surprising mixture of sweetness, sourness, crunchiness from the seeds, and chewiness from the flesh.

Red Dandelion Greens – bitter and crisp, dandelion greens are usually found in bagged salad mixed. By themselves their bitterness really comes through, and while many gardeners perceive them as a nuisance, they are quite high in vitamin C, iron, and calcium.

Fit-Fit – a traditional Ethiopian dish, made from crumbled pieces of teff-flour injera cooked in tomato, onion and various spices. It was a wonderful way to end our tasting.