TASTE WHAT YOU'RE MISSING

When Barb Stuckey began her career as a food product developer, she learned that her own palate her sense of taste was grossly underdeveloped. As time went on, she discovered a new world of flavors, and more importantly, she realized that people can learn to taste food better than they had before. Drawing on her years of experience working with leading food and beverage companies worldwide, Ms. Stuckey aims to help her readers do just that: taste and eat! better.

Ms. Stuckey begins by exploring the five basic tastes (Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Salt, and Umami) with chapters devoted to each taste and then moves on to demonstrate how we use the other four senses (hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling) as we experience food. Through her combination of scientific anecdotes and prescriptive techniques such as Taste Experiments, the author delivers a fully rounded book that educates as much as it engages. Whether it’s a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup, maple-cured bacon sizzling hot from the pan, or a salted caramel coated in dark chocolate, you know when food tastes good to you. But you may not know the story behind why you love some foods and can’t tolerate others. Now, in TASTE WHAT YOU'RE MISSING, the first book that demystifies the science of taste, you’ll learn how your individual biology, genetics, and brain create a personal experience of everything you taste—and how you can make the most of it. A seasoned food developer to whom food companies turn for help in creating delicious new products, Barb Stuckey reveals that much of what we think we know about how taste works is wrong. And the truth is much more fascinating - for instance, your tongue is not divided into quadrants for sweet, sour, salt, and bitter and only a fraction of what you taste happens in your mouth. As Stuckey explains how our five senses work together to form “flavor perceptions,” she tells intriguing stories about people who have lost the sense of smell or taste and the unexpected ways their experience of food changes as a result. You’ll learn why kids (and some adults) turn up their noses at Brussels sprouts and broccoli, how salt makes grapefruit sweet, and why you drink your coffee black while your spouse loads it with cream and sugar. TASTE WHAT YOU'RE MISSING will give curious eaters and amateur chefs the understanding and language to impress friends and families with insider knowledge about everything edible. What Harold McGee did for the science of cooking Barb Stuckey does for the science of taste in TASTE WHAT YOU'RE MISSING, a calorie-free way to get more pleasure from every bite! Barb Stuckey is a food industry veteran and former restaurant reviewer for Mobil Travel Guide. She is Executive Vice President of Marketing at Mattson, which consults for many of the largest food companies in the world and is North America's largest independent developer of foods and beverages for the chain restaurant and retail grocery foods industries. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Chow Magazine, and presents seminars covering the same material as this book and under the name "How to Taste Food." Barb Stuckey is a professional food developer who leads the marketing, food trend tracking, and consumer research functions at Mattson, North America’s largest independent developer of new foods and beverages. She and her “HyperTaster” fiancé divide their time between San Francisco and Healdsburg, in Northern California’s wine country.