Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I read something about this the other day pertaining to food, but Google comes up with a lot of sites referring to wine tasting or overtasting. Is anybody familiar with this term?

In my day...

...in economics, we discussed product sales volume being affected by a "declining propensity to consume". An individual can only make use so many cars. You can only "taste" so many wines. After 10 beers, you are affected by that declinninnngg posphenshitty to conshuum!

Overtasting (being overserved) reminds me of a friend who explained his questionable statement saying he had "merely over-spoke". We were all relieved that he had not been incorrect.

cc

Todd,

Well, palate fatigue is very familiar to wine tasters. Myself, I can only seriously taste about 7 to 9 wines in an afternoon and expect to seriously evaluate them, even if I'm spitting.

The same would apply to different tasting foods. In fact, I'm convinced that's why top San Francisco and New York food critics love such bizarre, inedible concoctions from avant-garde chefs; they have palate fatigue and simply can't taste another risotto milanese or trout muniere no matter how well done it is.

Actually there is a side issue to this that was proven time and time again during all the tastings (both products and recipes) we did at Cook's. When the palate gets fatigued (or even not), it goes back to familiarity. And in many cases, that was how childhood memories--I remember one butterscotch pudding recipe that they were working on (the final recipe was unbelievable but they chose not to publish it because it involved making caramel and that was judged to be too tricky for the readers). But so few people—even the professional cooks— had ever had homemade butterscotch pudding that it was incredibly tough to get past the Jello memory.

Lindsay,

This reminds me of the "canned pineapple syndome" which undid Hunt's development of un-burned ketchup.

Tim

ps: Mr. Kimball almost broke his arm patting himself on the back in Costco's magazine. He invented the reverse sear and the concept of slow cookiing, my a__!

He is more than welcome to my broken arm...

Amy

Why am I not surprised? "Let's dumb everything down as it's not 'profitable' to be aspirational." As if caramel is aspirational...Oy.

Amy

Maybe he'll take credit for that in his next posting from Vermont. He can call you Prunella,the local schoolmarm.

cc

You don't happen to have that recipe, do you? I loves me some butterscotch pudding. I made the one from Top Chef a few years back and it was pretty good but I'm always open to new ideas!

Sorry, since it wasn't published there's no way to get it--you might try making some vanilla pudding and adding caramel and go from there--I have faith that you can come up with something pretty great.