Translated material
"White noise"
The flavor is a mixture of several fragrant substances. In the recipes of flavorings that I personally developed, I usually had 1–20 components. I tried not to make long recipes. I just didn't see any sense in this. Although familiar with several respected colleagues who believe that complexity is the key to success, close to the “natural”.
Of course, any natural aroma is hundreds or even thousands of substances. But not all of them are important for perception. I have always been skeptical of the statements of people who assure my ability to make out the details of the aromas. Even among trained specialists there are few such. Moreover, studies stubbornly show that 99.99% of the perception of any complex aroma provide a maximum of two dozen substances. At the same time, the main note is 90% or more, 1–4 compounds are given. That is why I rarely went in the recipe for the number 20.
The complication of the recipe not only increases the likelihood of an error in production - it simply does not need. Our sense of smell is simply not designed to analyze such complex aromas to the components. We are not dogs. For life, both us and our ancestors had the ability to capture several main notes. Everything else is a background that is essentially not important.
So it always seemed to me. Listening to the reasoning of the critics and the experience of colleagues, producing recipes of fifty or more components, I continued to stamp simple but effective recipes of 15. At the same time, each time, throwing out of a difficult “professional” recipe for 50 unnecessary, for some reason it was possible to make an analogue of 15, which tasters could not distinguish from the original. Moreover, most “simple” artificial aromas in the conditions of a closed tasting were perceived even more harmonious than the “natural product”.
Another line of unnecessary complication, I always considered one famous culinary show. In it, an unconditionally talented presenter, constantly mixes rosemary, carry, 4 types of peppers, cloves, vanilla, garlic, cardamom and some little-known herbs that can only be disrupted on the day of all saints on Sumatra or exchange for glass beads of the Bushmen. It bakes all this with chicken or beef, supplying with sauce from balmic vinegar, mushrooms, olive oil, again pepper and garlic, fried juniper berries to caramel from brown sugar, orange juice and white Italian wine.
I did not understand what the point of mixing it is all in one place, especially in the proportion of "by eye." Maybe this creates a feeling of complexity and complexity, but after all, it is impossible to figure it out. This is a taste without taste. This is a mixture in which such a number of shades that each individual shade loses its meaning. Each separate aroma and so consists of two dozen key substances and several hundred indifferent to our sense of smell. Having mixed and fry them with the chicken, ultimately we get a wild mixture, the composition of which will not fit into a chemical encyclopedia. But the final aroma by 99.99% will still determine a maximum of two dozen substances. Most of what we added to the product or synthesized in it in the process of cooking will be behind the fence of our perception.
The other day, an interesting work has been published, which may be a good illustration of what is happening. Researchers compared a mixture of fragrant substances with different smell. Of course, not familiar aromas to us. And the concentration of substances was selected so that the smell intensity was the same. Testing the mixtures made, they discovered what was expected.
The number of components really matters. It is not difficult to distinguish one substance from another. Simple mixtures of several substances are also noticeably different from each other. However, the more components were used, the more similar smells turned out. At the number 20, tasters simply began to confuse one mixture with the other. When the number exceeded 30, the smells became indistinguishable from one another, even if there was not a single common component in their composition. The number passed into quality, but not the way lovers of “complex” sensations would like. The sense of smell simply ceased to cope with the incessed amount of information, turning a complex aroma into a “white noise” similar to what we see on the TV screen when the signal disappears or we hear in a room in which several hundred people are simultaneously talking.
Against the backdrop of this “white noise”, individual distinguished components will be distinguishable, just as the smell of linalool against the background of hundreds in the cardamon, or vanillin smell against the background of substances in vanilla. But all hundreds of substances that are in nature and which are really not part of the flavorings are just a “white noise”. We "do not see" him with our sense of smell. The “white noise” of an orange indistinguishable from the “white noise” of smoked salmon or freshly baked bread. The real difference between the aromas important to us is all the same two dozen substances that make up the flavor. The rest of the “complexity” does not carry a special semantic load.
And yet. Bake chicken with all the seasonings available in the kitchen at the same time, as the famous TV presenter recommends us, is very stupid. This is just a vain translation of seasonings.