My favorite day of the week has once again rolled around!
Today's topic of discussion: How to improve your flavor palate.
While it certainly can seem like some people are just born with a better sense of flavor than others, and this may be true to some extent, but for the most part, the biggest advantage these people have over you is practice. Tasting and understanding flavors is a learned talent.
There is one major glaring common trait that new people who show up in this sub with great sense of taste have in common. They love to cook. Think about it realistically. They have years of flavor palate training opposed to people who don't like to cook. They try new flavors, think about how to utilize them, and layer them into their dishes.
Now, this is not the only way to get a good palette, but it's definitely a good start. Some of my suggestions have already been covered in depth by other Modest Monday posts, but I have a few other fun things as well:
- Clone Simple Juices
- Single Batch Testing
- Take flavor notes on food
- The smoothie game
- Spice up your food
#Clone Simple Juice
This is such a great place to start. It really is. When you can pick up a single flavor juice and immediately identify it, you're off to a great start. I recommend some like Vape Wild or Mount Baker Vapor. This teaches you to recognize your flavors at your disposal, and at what percentage to use them at to achieve a certain flavor.
#Single Batch Testing
The hot new craze in this sub! Ride the waves, get some of that sweet karma and attention, and best of all, experience.
With all that I've wrote l written on this topic already, I will simply point out a fun little game I used to play with my single batch tests.
Mix up 2 sets of similar flavored single batches. Label one set as "1, 2, 3, etc". Label the other set with their actual contents. Let them steep as necessary, then try to match them up with their appropriately labeled counterpart tester. I found this especially helpful for fruits given their wide range choices and similar profiles
#Take flavor notes on food
It's just more practice. That's all it is. Making the conscious decision to not just enjoy your food, but to actually taste it.
Right now, I'm drinking a Monster Zero Ultra. It's main flavor profile is a pineapple heavy fruit punch. It's rather sickeningly sweet, but the sweetness is artificial. It's kind of waxy and chemical like Stevia. Underneath the sweetness and fruit is a lot of flavors I just can't pinpoint. Herbal, medicinal, earthy. Probably all the vitamins and herbs in this crap.
#The Smoothie Game
This is something my SO and I have been doing for years now. She's a chef and loves to make smoothies and then have me try to guess what's in them. Since everything is blended together, it sort of mimics the homogenization of a DIY juice. It once again gives you practice in identifying flavors within a mixture, with the added benefit of actually being able to figure out what's in it and seeing how close you really are.
#Spice up your food
Start playing with spices, herbs, and maybe even some reductions in your food. Even if your just a hot dogs and hamburgers kind of person, there's still a lot you can do to your food to help you gain a better understanding of how flavors interact with each other.
If I'm feeling lazy and don't want to cook, I love a hot dog with celery salt, diced onions, and stone ground mustard, or a roast beef sandwich with cumin salt, pickled horseradish, and mayo.
Cooking really isn't any different that DIY juice mixing. It's learning to appreciate new and different flavors and how to best utilize them together.
#Conclusion
That's it folks. Hope you find this useful. These are just fun little tricks to help you in the kitchen and in your DIY lab. And besides, you have to eat, so why not work on your mixing while doing so?
Previous Modest Mondays as referenced can be found at /r/ModestMonday
Be sure to check out Matthew Kocanda and myself tonight on BeginnerBlending at 9pm EST www.mixlr.com/inthemix-podcast.
Don't forget to enter /u/enyawreklaw's flavor challenge: Cannoli
Right now, the pot for first prize is set at $100 cash
She's a chef and loves to make smoothies and then have me try to guess what's in them.
I was wondering how you got such great insight, I was assuming your job had something to do with food. But as always behind every great man is a great woman.
Couldn't have said it better myself!
Before I met my SO, I was eating boiled chicken and raw vegetables. I ate like a 6 year old kid
Awesome info, ty sir! I agree, I think the connection to food and e-juice is very real. I like the smoothie idea and "spice it up!" One thing I like doing is going to FroYo spots and trying the different flavorings they have there; my lady loves FroYo and although I find it unnecessary, it is interesting to taste the different flavors and see what they're doing to come up with them. Whether it's Creamy Limoncello, Pink Guava Passionfruit, or just strawberry, it's always kind of a flavor adventure!
While it makes more sense the way you wrote it, Wayne's name is wrong. It's /u/enyawreklaw. Great post though.
For some reason I think his recipes are horrible.
Probably because you can't taste anything after ruining your olfactory senses by exposing them to pure nicotine with a fan.
Some of his recipes are horrible to ME. But that is because of my personal preference. I hate INW biscuit it just tastes nasty and it just dominates any recipe its used in. The smell makes my stomach turn. Does it mean his recipe sucks. Nope. His bluenuts is vomit to me but that might be because of a bad batch of FLV blue berry muffin. The flavoring itself reeks of chemicals and just makes me sick.
And god wayne stop using so much TFA ripe straw. Its nasty.
See different tastes = different opinions on recipes.
"Even if you're just a hot dogs and hamburgers kind of person..."
Plenty of chance to explore even with "easy food". Start making your own relishes/chutneys, mustards, ketchups, BBQ sauces & fermenting your own saurkrauts/pickles!
Condiments are a seriously under-rated hobby, and usually don't even require turning on a stove. They're a great, inexpensive way to explore new flavor profiles.
I'm missing where to enter the cannoli flavor challenge.
Love the smoothie idea for training your palate. Brilliant.
I'm a chef as well, have been for about 10 years, so my palate has had plenty practice, but I still find myself picking up new and different notes in familiar flavors/foods. I.e. I'll eat something I've eaten several times before, but somehow pick up different notes in it that I didn't before. It's amazing how much your palate changes day to day and with age especially. Honestly, being a chef made the transition into DIY fairly easy; creating recipes and pairing flavors is my day to day job. BUT, being a chef sometimes gets in the way when mixing juice. My culinary instincts are in full blaze when I test a juice and think, "Needs salt", "Needs acid". Lol. It took some getting used to and realizing that creating flavors in vaping is much different than food. But it makes it much more interesting for me.
Another great topic. Another great podcast this week. Same here on the cooking. When we have large family gatherings (15+ people) I do most of the cooking... Although I consider myself an average, at best, e juice mixer. I'm a great cook. It most certainly translates over in so many areas. Cooking and juice mixing go hand in hand. No doubt. Again, Great job on the weekly post and podcast. Thanks so much.
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Inspired by this post, the accompanying podcast, and the recent flavor review trend, I decided to take tasting a step further.
My wife and I spent an evening doing blind tastings of flavors. I took my box of 15mL testers and dumped 'em all in a pillowcase, and drew them at random. I placed a couple of wraps of painter's masking tape over the bottle, masking both the label and the color of the liquid. We each tasted the samples, sharing the same RDA, and wrote our own notes. After we were each satisfied that we weren't going to glean any further insights from tasting, we compared notes before revealing what it was that we tasted.
What I learned
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The suggestive power of knowing the name of a concentrate before you taste it is staggeringly powerful.
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Even no-nic taster mixes have a limited shelf life. The ones I prepared about 9 months ago are all uniformly sweet and bland. Other than TFA English Toffee, I might as well have been trying to taste the different colors of M&Ms. They're getting dumped down the drain tonight.
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Drinking water between pulls helps keep the palate calibrated.
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It's fun as hell.
Conclusion
I highly recommend trying blind tasting. It's hard to escape the nagging thought that what we taste blind is the true measure of a concentrate.
I'd love to hear reasoned arguments defending non-blind tasting.