When they smell sweet, floral and fruity, they are bound to be good. When shopping for peaches, nectarines, mangoes, pineapples and rock melons, the best way to determine their ripeness and flavour is by lifting them up to your nose and smelling them. Our sense of smell is useful for both the selection of ingredients and the process of cooking. While elephants are considered to have the finest and most sharply developed sense of smell of any animal, mammal or otherwise (they have nearly 2000 distinct genes dedicated to the sense of smell), we humans are able to detect up to 10,000 different odour molecules. In fact, around 80 per cent of the flavours that we discern, are actually distinguished by smell, which explains why foods seem tasteless when you have a blocked nose. Our tongues, or rather the taste buds on our tongues, identify only the qualities of sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami. Good or bad they find their way into our memories, ready to pop out unexpectedly, triggered by nothing more than a mere passing waft or sniff from a jar or a bottle. You didn’t even need to taste them to know they would be awful. This unpleasant smell took me straight back to a school camp at Resolution Bay when I was 12, where every morning we had scrambled eggs for breakfast and every morning they were horribly burnt. And all because I popped outside while the frittata was on the stovetop without realising that the element (induction) was on high. It’s a hard smell to get rid of - pungent, bitter, almost tinny, hanging around like - well yes, a bad smell.
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