Blue Dot Test
Have you ever wondered why some people like bland, unseasoned food? Ryan and I err on the side of overspicing. We love rich espresso, dark chocolate, kalamata olives, aged white cheddar, garlic, chili peppers, curry, and dry red wine. This, we just discovered, is because we are non-tasters.
The book Harmony on the Palate, which is primarily about wine pairings, has a test you can take to find out if you are a non-taster (25% of the population), a medium-taster (50%) or a super-taster (25%). Essentially, our perception of taste is based on how many taste buds we have. Super-tasters have more taste buds than medium- and non-tasters. To a super-taster, the things Ryan and I like to eat are too intense.
The test is simple: Place one of those ring stickers used to reinforce the holes in binder paper on your tongue, near the front but not on the tip. Then use a q-tip to put a drop of blue food coloring inside the circle. Then you need a magnifying mirror (or a mirror and a magnifying glass) and look at your tongue. Pink dots appear through the blue dye. These are the fungiform papillae that contain taste buds. So you just count up how many of the pink dots you can see inside the circle. More than 35 means you’re a super-taster, 15-35 means you’re a medium taster, and less than 15 makes you a non-taster. I had about 10 which makes me a non-taster. You get a nice blue dot on your tongue when you take the test, which is a nice bonus.
So I guess this means that we can’t call people wusses for not being able to handle spicy foods because genetically, they just have more taste buds. And besides, the name “super-taster” makes them kind of sound like a hero so I wouldn’t mess with them.
The book also explains the proper way to have a wine tasting - the science behind the swish, the spit and all the other pretentious wine snobbery. I really like the wine aroma wheel. Ryan is effortlessly descriptive (see his description of my raw sushi in this post) but I need some prompting and the wheel helps. “This wine is mushroomy with a little yoghurt and the essence of cut green grass” for example. Good recipes, too. Makes a great wedding gift (that’s how we got it).
Is it too early for a glass of the red now?
COOL. (grocery list: reinforcements, blue food colouring). Garren thought he was a super-taster and so claimed he could taste the grow-dirt and the level of rot in raw veg. But this test will determine how true that is! - afterall he does like all those non-taster foods. This totally turns upsidedown my view of my perceived superior taste (heh).
oooo how interesting. in elementary school i did a science project on tastebuds based on some book i read. i made a tongue from clay to show the different types of tastebuds and where they are on your tongue. then i had samples of the various flavours and i would place a drop on a couple spots and see if they would taste one flavour more strongly in a specific area compared to another. it didn’t work. years later i read somewhere else that that theory had been wrong. our tastebuds are evenly distributed.