If there was a Nobel prize for cooking it would go to Heston Blumenthal. Here’s the godlike chef’s latest ruminations on what goes on in your mouth:

The next time you go to a restaurant, remember that eating is a process that involves all the senses. Any notion that food is simply about taste is misguided. Try eating a beautifully cooked piece of fish off a paper plate with a plastic knife and fork, or drinking fine wine from a polystyrene cup – it is not the same.

The sense of taste can be broken down into five basic categories, all of which happen in the mouth and nowhere else. These categories are: salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (the most recently identified taste). There is a current theory that fat is a taste but this has yet to be proved.

We have up to 10,000 taste buds on the tongue and in the mouth. These regenerate, so the receptors that we use today will not be the same as were used a couple of days ago.

When we eat, taste buds on our tongue pick up taste but not flavour. The molecules in food that provide flavour pass up into the olfactory bulb situated between the eyes at the front of the brain.
It contains hundreds of receptors that register aroma molecules contained in everything that we eat and smell. This is where the flavour of the food is registered.

There is a simple but effective and enjoyable way of demonstrating that smell and taste are registered in different parts of the head. Have ready some table salt and biscuits, fruit or anything easy to eat.

This article was taken from Heston’s contribution to the Good Food Guide 2006 – buy it now from Amazon for under £11 – cheaper than anywhere else.

Squeeze your nostrils tightly enough to prevent breathing thorough them, but not so tight as to hurt. Take a good bite of biscuit or fruit and start chomping, making sure that the nostrils remain clenched. You will notice that it is impossible to perceive the flavour or aroma of the food being eaten.

Now, with nostrils still squeezed and food still in the mouth, lick some salt. Although it was impossible to detect the flavour of the food that was being eaten with clenched nostrils, the taste of the salt is unhindered. Finally, let go of your nostrils and notice the flavour of the food come rushing into your headspace.

The brain also has to process information given to it by the other senses while we are eating, sometimes with surprising results.

A few years ago at a sommelier school in France, trainee wine waiters were put through a routine wine tasting. Unknown to them, a white wine that they had just tasted had been dyed red with a non-flavoured food dye, then brought back out to taste and evaluate.

Something very interesting happened. They all made notes on the assumption that the wine was what it looked like – red. In this case, the eyes totally influenced flavour perception.

A couple of years ago, I developed a simple appetiser inspired by this very experiment; orange and beetroot jelly. The dish consists of just two squares of jelly, one orange and the other beetroot.

The jellies, however, are not what they appear to be. What looks like orange is, in fact, yellow beetroot juice, and what looks like beetroot is blood orange. The expected flavours are therefore reversed without tampering with the colours.

We all know that chewing-gum loses its flavour after a period of time. But it does not become tasteless as quickly as we might think. When we chew, the sweetening agent in the gum gradually dissolves in the mouth and is then swallowed, reducing the gum’s sweetness.

The brain tracks the sweetness and as this reduces, so too does the perception of the mint and menthol flavours. In reality, however, it has been proven that these aromas remain in our headspace for several hours.

One way to avoid this satiated effect, where flavours cease to register, is to create bursts of flavour. At the restaurant, we do this by using small cubes of jelly that literally burst in the mouth. It is quite easy to create the same effect while cooking at home.

Certain spices, coriander seed for example, can give wonderful bursts of flavour, making a dish much more exciting than one that incorporates the same amount of coriander powder.

Another way to demonstrate this is to make a cup of coffee with a single ground bean – it will be most insipid. Now take a coffee bean whole and pop it into your mouth.

Crunch it several times and then knock back a cup of water. When served like this, the same amount of coffee and water will provide a far greater burst of coffee that will last in the mouth.

It is this principle that was the catalyst for the much publicised bacon-and-egg ice cream I serve at the Fat Duck, my restaurant in Bray. The idea with this dessert was not to create a dessert that was based on breakfast but to play with the whole concept of encapsulation.

Eggs thicken ice cream custard because the proteins in the egg coil up and thicken the mix when subjected to heat. The coiled proteins are now in an encapsulated form and can make the resulting ice cream taste of egg by supplying bursts of egg flavour. In order to avoid this potential egg flavour, I reduced the cooking temperature of the custards, resulting in incredibly clean ices.

I then started to wonder what would happen if I made custard loaded with egg yolk and overcooked it, to the point of scrambling. If the mix was then puréed and passed through a fine mesh sieve before churning, what would the ice cream taste like?

The first mouthful transported me back to my youth and the fond memory of Saturday mornings when my mother used to make fried egg on toast. Although a study in the science of ice-cream making and flavour encapsulation, this ice cream had created the emotion of an English breakfast.

As well as allowing us to enjoy food, the senses act as warning systems, taste being the last of the sensory barriers, and bitterness the last of the taste barriers.

A natural aversion to bitterness can prevent us from eating foods that could be harmful, although it appears that we have the ability to be able to modify such basic likes and dislikes. For example, we generally grow to like bitter foods such as tea, coffee and beer as we grow older.

I began thinking about this whole subject a couple of years ago when I noticed that more and more customers were commenting on the fact that the red cabbage with grain-mustard ice cream served as an appetiser just got better each time they ate it. This was the only dish on the menu whose recipe had not changed over the past year.

It seemed that the barrier being presented with this dish was the vivid purple colour of the cabbage; a colour not normally associated with food. To some diners, the initial difficulty of accepting this colour interfered with the appreciation of the dish but as they got used to it they lost their inhibition and simply enjoyed its flavour.

Smell is the most powerful memory trigger of all of the senses but we differ so greatly in which smells hit the right or wrong notes. As well as our emotions and associations differing greatly from person to person, we all live in our own sensory world. Each of us hears and smells things differently.

It was, until quite recently, considered that we had around 300 receptors which, between them, were responsible for registering all aroma molecules on earth.

It is now thought that we have some 400 but only use about 300 of them. We do not all use the same receptors and therefore register flavour molecules differently. Two people tasting the same banana will not necessarily register the same flavour.

The same goes for sight and sound. The whole process of flavour perception is multi-sensory. We all have our own perception of life. Not only do we see, hear and taste differently but we have our own individual, personal experiences, emotion and memory.

As long as this continues, the world of eating will be a very exciting place.