When we taste food, most of us don't stop to think about it much. 'Oh, that's yummy' or 'I don't like that' is probably as far as it goes in most cases. In fact, the process is far more complex. The interest of foods actually rests with a sequence of flavours, the abruptness with which we move from one to the next and the contrast between layers of flavour. It's a bit like sniffing wine. Stick your nose into a glass after you have swirled it around, and you will pick up a whole series of different flavour notes, because they contrast with each other.
For some time now, food manufacturers have been using a technique called micro encapsulation that makes use of the way we taste food to make our food taste 'better'. Well, that may be a matter of taste, too, but this is what they do.
The manufacturers tumble the flavouring agent, garlic, say, with a pasta-like carbohydrate that is heat-resistant but which dissolves in steam. This process coats the flavour molecules, so trapping and sealing them inside. Then these tiny balls of flavour are mixed with another substance, butter, say, in the manufacture of garlic butter for baguettes, and this doctored butter is spread inside the bread. Then, when you heat the bread in the oven at home, the water in the butter turns to steam, the steam melts the carbohydrate, so releasing the garlic flavour molecules. Clever, or what?
Now you know another of the tricks of food manufacturers. And, believe it or not, you can apply similar principles of flavour encapsulation to your cooking at home. I will explain how next week.