Putting Your Taste to the Test

The holidays for us fall right in the middle of the planning for the 2010 Catersource Conference & Tradeshow. We have a lot of great ideas for the show, but decided to put some of them to the test as part of our staff holiday potluck.

New at the 2010 Conference is the CatersourceXperience Room, a place where you can get up close to dozens of presentations, interactive demos and really Xperience a world of new ideas. Included in these Xperiences are a Blind Taste Test and Taste Tripping.

To make sure these Xperiences were going to be good for our attendees, the Catersource team put them to the test!

BLIND TASTE TEST

Our staff split into two teams to compete for the office title in the Blind Taste Test. Tasters donned a blindfold and headphones to rely 100% on taste with no other sensory input. Each team member tried 5 different foods and got one point for each correct guess. Here are the results:

How good are YOUR tastebuds? Get ready to find out as you take the Blind Taste Test in the CatersourceXperience Room at the 2010 Conference in March.

TASTE TRIPPING

Have you heard about the hot new rage called "Taste Tripping?" The use of a special "pill" won't alter your sense of perception, but it will send your tongue on a wild ride!

We did some research to try and find out more and then we decided to incorporate this into the CatersourceXperience Room at the 2010 Conference - after we tested it out of course!

A taste-altering tablet is made from The Miracle Berry (Synsepalum dulcificum), a fruit native to West Africa. The berry is red in color and has a subtle tart flavor. Miracle Berries contain the glycoprotein, Miraculin, within the pulp of the fruit. After Miraculin coats the tongue it temporarily causes acidic and bitter flavored food and beverages to be perceived as sweet.

Flavors we tried include: lemon, lime, grapefruit, olive, vinegar, apple cider, truffle salt, pickles and soy sauce. The unexpected tastes experienced resulted in some mixed emotions!

Come and experience "Taste Tripping" for yourself as part of the 2010 offerings at Catersource in Las Vegas.

Another Way to Test Your Taste

How will you fare in the tasting experiences at the 2010 Conference? Conduct a simple scientific experiment to find out whether you have a supertaster tongue or not. All you need is:

• Food coloring
• Cotton swabs
• Reinforcement rings for hole-punched paper
• Magnifying glass

This is what you need to do:

1. Using a cotton swab, swab some food coloring on to the tip of your tongue
2. Place a reinforcement ring on your tongue
3. Use the magnifying glass to count the pink dots within the reinforcement ring.

The pink dots are your fungiform papillae. They don't take up the food coloring. These papillae are the tiny bumps on your tongue that house your taste buds. The more papillae you have, the more taste buds you have and the more sensitive to taste you are. On average, non-tasters have fewer than 15 papillae in that area, while supertasters have over 30.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/articles/senses/tongue_experiment.shtml