Hot and cool: Serving temperature and the food taste

When I eat the food, some foods taste good only in hot temperature and some other foods taste pretty nice even in cold temperature. Obviously, serving temperature of the food has a close relationship with the taste of the food. Some foods are good or better when they are served with the right temperature. It is hard to tell that hot serving temperature is always better than cold serving temperature. So, I’m going to explain why foods have different taste in different serving temperature.

According to Karel Talavera Perez, at the University of Leuven in Belgium, human’s perception of taste decreases when the food serving temperature rises higher than 35C because human’s body accept this high-temperature food as a hazard. So, we can feel a taste like burning. He also said that perhaps we do taste at such high temperatures but we don’t pay attention to it because there is a burning feeling. Simply, a burning taste is a kind of our body alarm to notify the dangerous and it makes us unable to feel the taste.

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In 2005, Journal of Sensory Studies found that the taste of cheddar cheese was perceived differently in different serving temperatures. Researchers prepared the cheese with different serving temperatures which were 5C, 12C and 21C. They found that the taste of sourness increased as the serving temperature rose. They also found that it is much harder to evaluate the taste of cheese when it was served with hotter temperatures. Other types of food also showed differences in their tastes when they were served with different temperatures. For example, ice cream gets sweeter when the serving temperature rises, the beer tastes more bitter with warmer serving temperatures and ham tastes saltier in cold serving temperature.

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According to a study published in the journal Nature in 1999, temperature changes in certain part of human’s tongue can create an illusion of the taste. Heating the front part of the tongue can cause an illusion taste of sweetness and cooling the front part of the tongue can evoke a taste of sourness and saltiness.

Overall, if you want to have a certain type of taste or you just want to enjoy your food, this can be a helpful information for you. I think I will use some of them to make my food more delicious.

 

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4 thoughts on “Hot and cool: Serving temperature and the food taste

  1. Michael Thomas

    I have always perceived food to taste better when hot vs cold. I never realized that there was an actual scientific reason behind it. The fact that our tongue’s taste changes with different temperatures of foods is incredible. I found another cool article talking about this cool fact.

  2. Emanuel Gabriel Mitchell

    I’m glad you posted this because for years my dad has been telling me and my siblings to come get the foo, while it’s hot. Instead we wait a few minutes for it to cool down, so we can taste the food better. This blog evidently supports my hypothesis. After some research , I found that a balance between cold and warm foods is necessary for one’s GI (gastrointestinal) health. I also came across foods that naturally boosts one’s body temperature. A few things on the list were cayenne pepper, iced water, and brown rice. For more information on these foods, boost one’s body temperature, follow this link

  3. Isaac Benjamin Will

    This was a good blog- and it’s really enlightening to a topic that faces every student, every day. Most sane, healthy people eat meals on a regular basis throughout the day. I know I do- however, I’ve never really taken the time to think about the temperatures of food. It’s essentially always just been assumed for me; I like it when my meats are warm (but not too warm) and I like it when other foods, like drinks are cold, and I think the optimal temperatures of some foods are lukewarm (neither particularly hot, nor particularly cold). However, I’ve never really thought about why I desire foods to be delivered at a certain temperature. I’ve never thought about the best temperatures of food, or what makes them the best.
    For this reason, your blog was very interesting and enlightening to me. The fact that food providing a burning sensation distracts from its actual taste makes complete and total sense.
    A few things that didn’t make sense and arose some questions for me, however, were why ice cream gets sweeter when it gets warmer. Maybe this was a typo? Or maybe it wasn’t- I’ll have to extend my research further. That’s very interesting. Even if you’re correct and ice cream gets sweeter when warmer, that’s something surprising I will enjoy looking into. Or if you’re wrong, and ice cream gets sweeter when it gets colder…well that’s something too that makes me wonder “why?”
    Also- ham tastes saltier in colder temperatures, you’ve reported. That’s strange. However…now that I think about it, I’ve noticed this before. When my mother’s served me ham colder, it does have a tendency to taste saltier than it does when it’s heated up (this has been one of the reasons I prefer my ham slightly colder). The question I think this blog post leaves us both with is, “why?”
    The possible answers escape my mind. However, if I had to throw out some sort of guess, I would assume that we can taste food the best when it is approximately the same temperature as the inside of our mouths. I’d maintain that this is the best possible temperature for our tongue to taste the food- it’s used to this standard temperature. It’s the quo. It is familiar with the tastes of the mouth at this Fahrenheit. For this reason, I imagine it has an increased ability to taste the food when it’s at the same temperature. But I could be entirely wrong.
    Some more information can be found here, especially regarding food temperatures and safety (It’s not in a hyperlink because I have a tendency to mess them up and obscure any ability at all to reach the website. It can simply be copied and pasted to the URL.) http://www.foodservicewarehouse.com/blog/food-safety-temperatures-danger-zone/

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