What makes food taste good? You most likely revisit your favorite restaurant because you love the taste of the food, but what makes the food from that restaurant taste better to you than the food from any other restaurant? To an extent, the skill of the chef and the combination of flavors are going to be the answer here. Every chef has different techniques and recipes that they’ve learned and perfected over the years that contribute to the unique taste of their dishes. But how about home cooking? I myself have cooked certain dishes multiple times that have tasted better on certain days over others. In this case, the chef is the same, the techniques are the same, and the environment is most likely the same as well. So what gives?

Taste is surprisingly complex. What we experience as good or bad “taste” involves all five senses in the eating experience. A crisp potato chip is going to “taste” better than a soft or soggy one, even if the actual blind taste of the chip is technically identical. Good smelling foods “taste” better than ones that smell unappealing or suspicious. Different people also have varying preferences around specific foods and ingredients - for one thing, there’s evidence that children will like the foods that their mothers consumed while pregnant. While interesting in its own right, personal preference doesn’t really play a role in our exploration of what makes the same dish cooked by the same person taste better on one day versus another.

One thing that has changed from time to time for me is the actual ingredients I use. Let’s take pasta, for example. I’ll typically make sauce from scratch by cooking down tomatoes. Usually I’ll buy these tomatoes from anyone who sells produce at the farmer’s market on the weekend. When I visit my family in the summer, though, my mom will give me bags of tomatoes grown on our farm to take back and I’ll use these tomatoes to make my sauce. The sauce made from our own farm-grown tomatoes inevitably tastes better than any other sauce I make, even though I use the same techniques to make all tomato sauces. When adding parmesan cheese on top of the pasta, the freshly grated cheese I buy from the international grocer near Port Authority adds an altogether better taste than the pre-packaged parmesan cheese from the grocery store. With the pasta, I had different ingredients that I could compare between versions of the same dish, but recently, I followed a recipe for cookies for the very first time and I had friends telling me that they were some of the best cookies they’ve ever had, and this really got me thinking. If I barely ever make cookies, what could have influenced the taste of these cookies? Because it certainly wasn’t my skill and experience. Maybe some good luck - although on that day I didn’t have much luck between burning myself in the oven and only realizing an hour before needing to leave the apartment that our new baking sheet was too big for our tiny oven. Anyway, the only thing I could think of that may have been different in my recipe from what most people would use was the butter - which is indeed a major ingredient in cookies: I used fresh sweet cream butter that I had bought at the farmer’s market. If this major ingredient was the reason for the better taste, it would explain why I’ve gotten similar comments from others about the aforementioned pasta I make with my mom’s tomatoes. Perhaps somewhat pseudoscientifically, this removes much of the bias that I might have had for our own farm-grown produce, since ingredient substitutions from sources other than our own farm have yielded better taste.

In the case of the parmesan cheese, we can guess at some more straightforward reasons as to why the freshly grated, imported cheese tasted better - the aging process and lack of preservatives springing to top of mind. As for the butter or the tomatoes, the question is more complex. Why do these ingredients taste better? Could it be the nutrients in the soil that the tomatoes grow in or the grass that the cows eat? “Flavoromics” is still a growing and evolving approach to research in food science, and there are a lot of interesting questions to answer about what makes certain ingredients taste better, or if fresh and well-grown ingredients actually do taste better in blind taste tests. There is evidence that dairy products from grass-fed cows taste and smell different, for example, but not much research beyond that. It would be fascinating to know what exactly makes foods grown or developed in different ways taste better or worse. In the meantime, try making your favorite recipe using freshly-grown, organic, and well-raised alternatives to your standard ingredients and see if you can notice the difference in taste. If my experience in cooking is any indication, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Sources: