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Victoria Burrows

How to describe the scent of ripe strawberries?
Fruity, fresh, floral, perhaps a little buttery, and, of course, sweet. Except that the human nose is unable to detect sweetness.
We associate the scent of ripe fruit with sweetness thanks to repeatedly eating them and tasting the sweetness on our tongue. The same is true of caramel scents and vanilla.
When it comes to eating chillis, on the other hand, spiciness is neither a smell nor a taste. It is a feeling.
“We detect it with our sense of touch, it’s literally a feeling of pain,” says Dr Arielle Johnson, author of Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour.
“Spiciness is not a taste, but it is a part of flavour; spicy molecules activate pain and temperature sensors in our mouths, and all over our bodies, actually.”

We developed our sense of taste through evolution: sweet taste receptors identify sugars and tell us that a food is an easy source of energy; salty receptors pick up minerals essential to health; umami signal amino acids, the building blocks for protein; and bitter alerts us to potential toxins.
Our sour receptors evolved in our early human ancestors, who developed an ability to detect a sharp tang – and enjoy the experience.
“Bacteria can be bad, causing rotten food, but they can also be preservatives, through lactic acid. Our ancestors that chose healthy lacto-fermented food over other less positively fermented food would live longer, as they would essentially be poisoning themselves less,” says Johnson.
“They then passed this capacity on to their children and now, 2 million years later, we love sour, refreshing tastes because of this deep inherited love for fermented things.”
Learning about how taste and smell work is not only fascinating, it also has practical application. For both professional and home cooks and bartenders, understanding flavour can boost deliciousness.
After probably 100 times explaining the concept and saying, ‘I wish there was a book I could give you’, I decided to write that book
Dr Arielle Johnson
“You can make a sweet dish even sweeter by adding more sugar, but, if you’re satisfied with the sugar level, you can play with aromas instead,” says Johnson. “Aroma can modulate how we perceive taste. Including vanilla along with sugar in a dish makes it taste measurably, significantly sweeter.”
Similarly, spike a too-bitter negroni with “sweet” flavours such as orange peel, cloves or cinnamon, or add a sour-emphasising aroma such as lemon zest to boost the sharp bite of lemonade.
Insights such as these are just a tiny snapshot of Johnson’s wonderfully informative 300-paged flavour-science bomb.
Nothing about this lively book – with its cheerful, bright yellow cover, its perky writing and its informal, hand-drawn-style illustrations – hint at what stimulated the author to write it: a mounting sense of frustration.
US-born Johnson has a PhD in agricultural and environmental chemistry with a focus in flavour chemistry.

She co-founded the fermentation lab at chef René Redzepi’s three-Michelin-star Noma in Denmark’s Copenhagen, a restaurant that has been ranked by 50 Best as the World’s Best Restaurant five times and has been probably the biggest influence on global gastronomy in the last decade and a half.
She was head of research at MAD, Redzepi’s food symposium and think tank, and is now Science Director at culinary brand Noma Projects. She is a writer, speaker and consultant, advising at top restaurants around the world.
At school, she thought she would be a fashion designer, but during a liberal arts degree she “fell in with a bad crowd”, she says with a smile, and “ended up as a chemist”.
Her interest coalesced around avant-garde restaurants of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as El Bulli in Spain, where chef Ferran Adrià was rewriting the rules of cooking through his molecular gastronomy.
“A piece in The New York Times covered Ferran Adrià’s use of carrageenan, a gellifying agent, and I thought, ‘What the hell is this – you can use science to do this?’,” she says.

She signed up for a chemistry degree and, after her applications to study “both serious chemistry and gastronomy” were turned down by a string of universities, she finally found one willing to support her graduate studies in this unorthodox field.
“I started studying flavour and sensation in a way that I wasn’t even aware that you could before. Then I started working with food labs, including at Noma. I saw that what chefs were doing had this incredible parallel to what I was doing but the scientific information hadn’t crossed over,” she says.
“After probably 100 times explaining the concept and saying, ‘I wish there was a book I could give you’, I decided to write that book.”
The chefs are thankful. In the foreword, Redzepi describes Johnson as a “a secret sauce that makes everything a bit clearer”.
“Arielle changed the way that I think about flavour,” he writes. “If I had this book when we started on our quest 20 years ago at Noma, it would have saved us a lot of time and trouble.”
Mexican chef Santiago Lastra, who helms Kol, ranked No 17 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list 2024, along with the newly opened Fonda, both in London in England, says Johnson’s work opened doors for him.
“As chefs we chase flavour,” he says. “Understanding flavour, this knowledge, it’s our holy grail.”

Lastra, also a Noma alumnus after spearheading the restaurant’s seven-week residency in Mexico in 2017, uses a more scientific approach to creating flavour at Kol, where he makes modern Mexican dishes using only British ingredients.
He sees ingredients as “flavour experiences” – a particular Mexican fruit is something yellow, with floral notes, that is tart but also sweet, creamy and slightly fibrous, for example.
When wanting to replace this fruit with an ingredient, or ingredients, found in the UK, he will hunt out something that matches these characteristics.
“I would look for something yellow, use maybe elderflower for floral characteristics, add some bottle squash, and then perhaps add kombucha to make it sour, or ferment something,” he says.
How to categorise different flavours is covered in detail in part two of Flavorama. The book is structured corresponding to Johnson’s five laws: flavour is molecules; flavour is taste and smell; flavour follows predictable patterns; flavour can be concentrated, extracted and infused; and flavour can be created and transformed.
She puts the science into action in 99 recipes, including an “Algorithm for a Minimalist but Excellent Dressing for Lettuce” and “The Meatiest Slow-Cooked Meat”.

Being able to apply the knowledge in the book to a real-life context is important for Johnson.
Taste and smell are traditionally denigrated as baser or more animal senses; smell in particular is tied into emotions and memories as messages from our scent receptors shoot straight into the deep limbic system, making it our most intimate sense. But we are not in the habit of talking about it, says Johnson.
“Many of us think that chefs and sommeliers have great palates – have some mystical ability that other people don’t have. But this is completely false. Humans are exceptionally bad at describing smells but exceptionally good at distinguishing them – the impacts of Covid-19 aside – with our 400 or so smell receptors,” she says.
“The best way to engage with flavour is to practise and pay attention. Take a second and smell, taste and evaluate every ingredient before you cook with it. When sampling something new, try to situate it with things you already know how to use.
“This is the quickest way to get comfortable with new flavours and ingredients.”
Flavorama is published by HarperCollins (under Harvest, an imprint of William Morrow)


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Food and Drinks

Food scientist’s book Flavorama unlocks secrets of flavour, chefs call it a ‘secret sauce’

The five tastes as illustrated in a slice of tomato, in Arielle Johnson’s book Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour. Photo: Flavorama

The cover of Arielle Johnson’s book. Photo: Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour

Arielle Johnson is the author of Flavorama. She has a PhD in agricultural and environmental chemistry with a focus in flavour chemistry. Photo: Arielle Johnson

The flavour profiles of different spices, as depicted in Johnson’s new book. Photo: Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour

Kol’s Paleta features a sorbet combining British raspberries, Scottish birch water, and Italian meringue. Photo: Rebecca Dickson

Brown butter tamal, strawberries, buttermilk ice cream at Kol. Photo: Victoria Burrows

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Bourke’s head chef Tara Margarita and managing partner Brett Goss. Photo: Bourke’s/Gideon de Kock

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Margarita (right) and managing partner Goss. Photo: Bourke’s

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Riehn’s dish of langoustine with mango, citrus and chilli at Igniv Bangkok. Photo: Igniv Bangkok

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A toast goes up at Chaeg Bar, owned by Chung In-sung, in Seoul, South Korea. Photo: Instagram/chaegbar

Books for reading at Chaeg Bar, a space where you can read, reflect and even create while enjoying a drink. Photo: Instagram/chaegbar

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Shrimp roe thick noodle lo mien from Kwan Kee Bamboo Noodle in Hong Kong. Photo: Llewellyn Cheung

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Wheat noodles originate in Northern China, while rice noodles have Southern Chinese origins, says Dr Siu Yan-ho, a lecturer in Chinese language and literature at Baptist University. 

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Shrimp roe thick noodle lo mien at Kwan Kee Bamboo Noodle. Photo: Llewellyn Cheung

 Cheung Wing Kee started making noodles in the 1950s, producing small quantities using labour-intensive methods.

Roast goose with lai fun rice noodles. The thicker, neutral-tasting noodles are perfect for absorbing the flavours from the roast goose and broth. Photo: Llewellyn Cheung

Lifestyle

Food & Drink

Dr Arielle Johnson on why she wrote Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour and how she is bringing science to food


Dr Arielle Johnson on why she wrote Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour and how she is bringing science to food.


Books and literature

Science

Food scientist’s book Flavorama unlocks secrets of flavour, chefs call it a ‘secret sauce’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Dr Arielle Johnson on why she wrote Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour and how she is bringing science to food

Dr Arielle Johnson on why she wrote Flavorama – A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour and how she is bringing science to food