This episode is brought to you by WisTale. Ever wonder how winning brands like Shake Shack, Chopped, and Torchies Tacos scale their business and train employees, all while delivering an exceptional customer experience? They do it with WisTale. Learn more at WisTale.com. This week on Meet and Three, we bring you a sensational episode where each story hones in on one of the four senses that accompanies taste.
Many of the smells that we uh encounter in everyday life actually exist out there in the cosmos. Food carries all these culturally specific meanings. The fact that, you know, when you see an apple, it's not just an apple, right? I was mostly interested in thinking about what knobs ASMR was pulling on, maybe, or how we could explain it from a psychological or emotional or evolutionary standpoint. Tune in to Meet and Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup wherever you listen to podcasts.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Hero Digital Radio Network. I'm uh on the lower east side of Manhattan. We got uh John uh from uh customer service joining you uh from the new lab in Brooklyn. Nastasia from uh Topanga Canyon, where for reasons that are too complicated to discuss, she has to go outside to use the bathroom. I mean, at least for not at least for number two.
We can talk about it later, maybe if she wants to. We got Matt in his Rhode Island Heidi Hole doing the engineering. But today we have on special guest, Harold Moogie, who's coming down. Thank you. Thank you.
Nose Dive, a field guide to the world smells. What is that uh how how how are you supposed to say the title of the book, Harold? Is that like like how do you want it emoted? Uh boy, that's something I have not considered. I'll think about that and get back to you.
I mean, like I only know how to do it in kind of like, you know, um, the monster nose dive. That's all I can do. You know what I mean? Yeah. But but then, you know, a field guide to the world's smells, and there's there's the world's smells, kind of slows you down, right?
So it maybe it should just be guide to the world smells. You think the apostrophe yes and the s and the smells is what's you think that's slowing me down? Uh it's slowing me down anyway. Uh nothing slows you down. Is it is it like, do you want it to be more like um do you want it to be more like uh in a world?
Like that kind of like nosedive, a field guide to the world smells, like that, like more like a little bit foreboding. Yeah, I like that. I like that, especially with the the American jacket, you know, is kind of dark, uh mysterious. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the the UK version got an incense, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Smoke curling up into the atmosphere. Uh, but the the English one is very, very different. It's a white cover, and it's got an Erlenmeyer flask with all all sorts of different things inside the flask. Uh those lousy Brits. Those lousy Brits.
So you're doing you're doing two editions at once, the the British and the American edition. Uh the two of them are coming out simultaneously, yeah. Then there are a couple of translations in the works. Uh one in uh the Netherlands, amazingly. Uh I thought, and my experience has been that the Dutch, uh all Dutch speak English better than I do, uh, but but they like to read it in their own language.
And then in Spain, a translation is also being done. Nice into Spanish Spanish. Yes. Yeah, not into like Catalonian or something like that. That'd be good, that would be on point.
Right. You know what I mean? Um nice. All right. Well, I hope that it's a while before you have to deal with your persnickety uh Japanese translator.
That was a nightmare for you last time, right? It it was in a good way. And actually, I've I've been kind of going through that with the Dutch translator who is who's very good. He's uh a scholar of um uh food history in his own right, and uh so he's had all kinds of questions. Um, and some of them, you know, uh caught me out.
So I've learned a lot dealing with translators. Uh so listen, this book is not like your other books in that it is, I mean you do, I mean, you're a food person, so you you do talk a lot about food and and cooking in it, but that's not what it's about. You want to give people the kind of nutshell of what we're what you're what you've come out with here. First of all, how long you've worked on it, like just give it an outline of the project. All right, all right.
So uh it started out 10 years ago as a book about flavor, taste and smell. Uh you know, the what the things that make food delicious and interesting to me anyway. And uh uh, but as I began to write about taste and smell and foods and so on, uh other things kind of bubbled to the surface. I I began to, well, first of all, it seemed to me that uh i wanted to focus on smell because taste is of course really important but we can detect maybe you know something on the order of a dozen tastes plus or minus uh but we can detect uh hundreds thousands maybe more uh different smells so smells are what give foods their particularities and I must ask wait who who has the bell yeah I I have the bell and I have not been able to track down where it's coming from I'm sorry it's it's the sound of wisdom Matt I did it kind of was going off it was like to emphasize like good point or you might learn something here which I've okay so listeners that's what that is only taste 10 12 things ding for the rest of the show this is intentional SFX you're welcome or what I can do is I'm I'm pretty sure it's coming from the phone which I'm using to to record I could just shut it off and not have that second uh not have that backup so up to you guys sure or turn down the volume on the phone it's uh you know it it's not supposed to have notifications going so I the man just told you Matt he can't address why it's dingy okay okay then um yeah turn it off I guess okay I'll do that that's a bit that's a momentous decision right there I don't know yeah it's gonna bite us in the butt later all right okay so give me a sec sorry about this it's it's okay it's okay. Okay.
It's off. Anyway uh so I was writing about thinking about writing about flavor, focused on smells, and then began to wonder why it was that um smells kind of echo each other, you know, and I figured that uh that it had to do with the molecules involved. So, you know, parmesan cheese can smell like pineapple. Um, and there are reasons for that. But then I began to wonder why it was that foods can smell like um or have aromas like things that are not foods.
Uh okay, I'm being haunted. But now, Matt, we also don't have a lot of things. Now we don't have a backup rebound, and we have the bell. We're really killing it today. Let the man finish.
It's the sound of wisdom. I'm haunted. I'm haunted early. Uh I'm really sorry about this. Um we've addressed it enough that the listeners are just along for the ride now.
Okay, okay. Um so, you know, uh wines, wines speak, people uh often talk about wines having smells like uh uh you know, sweaty saddles, for example, uh, or rocks, minerals. My nickname kind of thing, yeah. Uh so I began to wonder why these other things in the world have the smells that they do, and that uh ended up really grabbing my attention, you know, because uh people have written about the the olfactory chemistry, the volatile chemistry of foods and drinks, but not so much about the rest of the world. And I thought it would be fun to try to pull all those things together, and it ended up being fun in a way.
Jeez, I have no idea what that feels like. Anyway, so the book is now a field guide to the world's smells, in which food and drink uh play a part, but uh and uh uh an important part because those are where we mostly encounter smells these days. Um but it it does try to cover everything else that I could think of, and that there was data for. Yeah, and speaking of data, so for those of you like um this is a tome. This is not like this is not like uh some sort of like pollen-esque, like you know, light read tour through, like this is like on the order of not as long as, but on the order of of uh on food and cooking, in that it like you start with kind of the structures of uh like the early universe, like volatiles that might be around, and then the how the earth kind of like came to be, and then the building blocks uh volatile smell building blocks that kind of life created, and then you kind of ramify from there, like here's what plants can do, here's what animals can do, and then go into an in-depth kind of description of all that along with what the individual compounds are that do it.
So it's one of those things where you kind of need to read it at least twice. Wouldn't you say that's accurate or no? Well, uh, I guess uh I did mean it um, or it did turn out to be in the end, uh uh something like a field guide, which is something that you don't necessarily read from cover to cover. It's something that you kind of browse in the first few chapters to get the idea of you know what birds are or what what beetles are, that kind of thing. Uh and then when you see something uh or hear a bird call that interests you, then you go back home and open up the the field guide and try to figure out what it was.
Uh so that's how I intend it to be used, although I did also try to make it readable so that if you happen to be interested, for example, in herbs and spices or in incense or something like that, that you could sit down and spend half an hour learning something about those things. Right, but you should really spend like you in other words, I think to really get the most out of it, there's a section near the beginning, I forget what you call it, um, like the it's not like building blocks, it's uh what is it? It's like you have a chart and you you you take like a like a chapter or two, what do you what do you call it? I'm gonna have to flip through the book now because I have a copy of it here. Um, you know, the basic building blocks and like what the structures are.
Oh, like the starter set and then beyond the starter set into the first couple of things, and you kind of need to go over those a couple of times because you're gonna keep coming back to those again and again. And I think understanding those kind of basic building blocks is gonna help you understand the stuff you write later, don't you think so? Yeah, I do think so. And I and I think it's just important uh an important point in its own right to that there are such things as building blocks. Uh, you know, that uh life uh in with all its diversity does uh when when you begin to uh fracture it and break it down, break it back down into its uh smaller constituents, you end up with the same basic set of small molecules that are small enough that they're volatile, that they can leave what it whatever it is they're in, fly through the air, and end up in our noses, which is the prerequisite for anything having a smell.
So, yeah, uh living things in general tend to fall apart into these this this uh starter set of different molecules, and we we encounter them all the time. And then, you know, also you uh interesting in the section on plants, for instance, you say, okay, listen, plants need to make these kind of structural and uh food storage molecules, and there's this kind of there's these uh you know specific pathways, and then on those specific pathways branching off are all these side reactions that create all of these like crazy uh volatils, and you kind of go through, and so it's it's kind of a pathway by pathway. Um kind of like, look, here's what this pathway does. And it's it's an interesting way to look at, and and and I think part of what you say in the intro is once once you kind of start understanding these kinds of pathways and how they're related, it can actually make your experience of the whole world more interesting, you know. Yeah, that's that's my hope.
Uh that's certainly the way I experienced it, because going into it, you know, I knew food and drink pretty well because I'd been writing about those things for a long time, but I had not been writing about plant uh biochemistry. I had not been writing about uh uh the early history of the earth uh and you know the smells that come out of volcanoes and things like that. So I was learning all that stuff for the first time. That's why it took me 10 years. Uh uh, but what really intrigued me was you know, why do these things exist?
Why are those particular molecules there? And in the case of plants, which are stuck in one spot in the earth and can't run away from predators, uh, they have to defend themselves and and deal with the world essentially chemically. And um so they they take advantage of the pathways that they use to make uh their physical structures, uh, to make uh chemical structures that can serve them well to repel predators or to uh you know to be come on to animals to uh pollinate their flowers or to disperse their fruits, um, and knowing that all that kind of thing is going on when you enjoy a mango, for example, I think adds to the experience of uh of mango hood. Yeah, yeah. And uh one other thing I'll note is that while you do not stint ever on using the names of the uh compounds and the families of compounds that are in it, because I guess you want you want people to know, right?
You don't have to know the stuff. You don't, in other words, you don't have to absorb everything to go to a later chapter and read about something and and you could still get the main gist, the thrust of the argument without you know, if if you don't know uh if you don't know a uh a terpenoid from uh from a lactone, you can still get the the general gist of what's kind of going on. So I would say don't be frightened of the fact that it does have all of this actual kind of chemistry in it. I wouldn't you would you agree with that or no? Uh again, that's certainly my hope.
And I I tried to arrange things to make it as easy as possible to skip over that stuff if you don't happen to be interested in it. So there are uh uh tables of the component smells that that make up the smell of a particular thing like a mango, uh, and then the molecules that are responsible for those smells. Uh the molecules are there, you know, uh for people who are interested in the chemistry, uh, and I became interested, so that's why I've included them, but also to make the point that these are not um uh tasting notes, you know. Uh these are not um some person sitting down uh smelling a mango and coming up with, well, it's got uh you know, uh pine note and uh and a strawberry note and a this note and a that note. It's not subjective, these are molecules that have been found in all these things uh that are responsible for the component smells that give us the overall smell.
So it's there uh uh the the molecules are there largely um uh to to make the point that these are uh not subjective notes, these are what science has found to have been involved in these wonderful smells that we enjoy. So before I get to the uh listener questions, I know Anastasia wants to talk about one specific section of the books. My favorite part in the herald that you you and I, when we were having drinks, explained it to me before the book came out, but that certain people, certain cultures, don't have body odor or bad body odor. And I find that so interesting. Can you talk about that?
Sure. Yeah. And that's something that I learned and you know took a couple of months to make sure that I really understand and uh it's it's really fascinating. So turns out, I mean, I I figured going into writing about uh the human body that most of the smells that uh that we emit are kind of accidental. You know, we have microbiomes, uh uh bacteria and and uh yeasts and all kinds of little creatures that live on our skin and inside us, and it's largely their activity that um that causes the uh the breakdown of our molecules into small things that are are volatile and that we can smell.
What I didn't realize was that uh our bodies have taken advantage of that fact, and so they actually make certain molecules that are brought to the surface of our skin, which which microbes then process in such a way as to give us our human uh body odors. And it turns out that um uh certain groups of human beings on the planet have more or less of these um kind of specialty um uh products that are meant for microbes to process to give us the smells that we have. And it turns out that Europeans, well, um, so uh apparently coming out of Africa and then spreading into um uh Europe and into Asia, uh, we started out with uh a pretty good complement of molecules that would end up smelling once bacteria on our skin got a hold of them and released them. But uh as culture as uh as people evolved uh separately, uh uh uh some of those smells became for whatever reasons, that's still the biologists are still working on this, but for ever whatever reason became less useful or maybe got in the way of something or other. And so uh it turns out that uh people in Asia tend to produce much less or even none of the molecules that um people of African and European and ancestry do that end up giving us uh a much stronger body odor than people in Asia have.
Crazy. And yet another reason we are hated. Um Harold, say the one thing when when Asians smelled or saw Europeans for the first time, then they smelled them, they were like, whoa, right? Uh yeah, no, there are terms in in uh Chinese that uh are are essentially mean essentially the the smell of the barbarian or uh and and um stories about uh Europeans who are able to turn from human into fox and vice versa, but they keep the same smell, and so that's how you know that who or what they are. Awesome.
Uh let me get to some uh let me get to some listener questions because you know, I could ask, you know, we could ask Harold questions all day, and then I will have asked people to ask questions in vain. Uh and also Matt, you're keeping an eye on the chat room in case people pop in, right? Okay. Chris writes in, I have a question. Why does white, and this is actually covered in the book, Chris.
So if you buy the book, you wouldn't have to ask. Why does ground white pepper smell like horses? It does. That's what he says. That's his note, it does.
I just say I don't use it. And Nils Noran, you know, uh uh, you know, our old uh compatriot hates it because he thinks it smells like uh like death and mold. He and and first of all, like whatever. So go give me some white pepper. Right.
So um black pepper is black because it has the uh the fruit coat of the um of the pepper fruit uh still intact surrounding the seed. And uh white pepper is white because that that fruit coat has been removed in the processing. And the the easiest way to remove the fruit coat on uh uh pepper fruit is essentially to ferment it, to you know, make big piles and then wet the pile down, and then microbes get to work um uh fermenting the the fruit pulp, and it becomes uh very easy just to kind of wipe it off. And so that's how you get white pepper is to do this fermentation step and then clean the the the fruit of the uh of the fruit pulp, and you're left with the seed, which is white. The problem is that that fermentation is usually taking place, well, I guess always taking place in tropical conditions and uh those fermentations are wild so that they are sometimes less than pleasant and when that happens you can end up with um volatiles that come from the fermentation not from the the pepper itself and that's what you're tasting when you're tasting uh white pepper that that is funky and most uh white peppers are funky some less than others it depends on how that fermentation has been been controlled if at all uh now follow up question is there any reason if if you throw out black specks as a reason to to use white pepper over black pepper is there any reason that white pepper exists uh well I can see uh I mean I'm I'm not a huge fan but I can see you know that it would if you in in small doses it might give an interesting sort of background complexity to something but you certainly want it wouldn't want it to be front and center and freshly ground and as a as a follow follow up you quote Pliny at least twice in the book at the beginning of chapters in one quote he says that he detests the taste of pepper why would you ever quote him again for anything because I think he was asking in that passage a very good question, which is why would human beings bother to be interested in this kind of thing?
Why would they want to you know give themselves pain and and value that kind of um uh uh sensation so much that the the cost of pepper was comparable to the cost of gold? That's that's what he was talking about in that passage. So you think he was actually being thoughtful and not just ragging on uh ragging on pepper and pepper? Oh I think both. I think both.
I mean he was uh yeah, I mean he uh ragging and and insight are not uh you know uh necessarily to be dissociated. Fair point. If it if it yeah, fair point. All right. Uh Peter Stewart writes in uh I have a smell-related question.
Why does raw egg make dishes smell like wet dog? And is there a simple way to neutralize it? If it gets in the dishwasher undetected, it can spread to the whole load of dishes, which is a problem when you live with a nose. You want to talk about what a nose is, and then maybe if you have an answer to the question. Okay.
Well, a nose, uh, I'm assuming that a nose uh in the this context is uh a nose in the larger culture, which is someone who uh has been trained to pay attention, uh, very close attention to smells. And that's usually someone who is working in the in the flavor or fragrance industries. Um so this is an interesting question. I remembered uh talking about it with Audrey Saunders years and years ago because she to her it was uh a problem that comes up in any drink that's made with a shaken with a with an egg white. The the shelf life or the the the bar life for her was was very short because that smell would develop very quickly.
Dave, is is that something that that you would agree with? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why, like uh we you know the the the best solution the problem is is that people like to see the egg freshly freshly cracked out. I mean that that smell dissipates over the course of a couple of hours. So if you crack it out before service and let it kind of air out, it'll it'll go away.
But I don't think that'll stop the dishwasher smell, which might be a reification of the smell. I don't really, I never looked into it. I just, you know, I was like, I can't solve this. So, you know, Audrey's was to cover up the aroma, and mine was to either like not use the egg white or wait, you know, and so I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
So uh ever since Audrey pointed it out to me, I've I've been interested in wet dog smell and eggs, and have been uh searching for an answer. And what I've come up with are you know, little fragments of possibilities, but no unified theory for why it is that uh that eggs have that wet dog smell. Uh people have studied the smell of wet dogs, amazingly. In fact, that's that's one of the cool things that uh that I was just amazed at over the course of the the years I was writing this book is how many oddball things scientists have gone to the trouble to track down and and figure out. So there have been you know uh uh gas chromatography, old factometry studies done of wet dogs, among many other things.
And um uh make to make a long story short, because it is just uh you know a series of possibilities, uh wet dogs themselves have actually um this molecule cresol, which is also one of the culprits in the smell of uh white pepper that we were just talking about. And so it's possible that because egg whites are basically all protein, protein plus water, and protein is rich in nitrogen, and cresol is a byproduct of the breakdown of amino acids, that for some reason there are just traces of um of that particular molecule in egg whites, which some people are really sensitive to and others just aren't. Um but there are other possibilities. I mean, the the um uh I I came across a paper about the smell of uh the off-smell of fish and fish oils, which can be pretty nasty, um, which discovered a molecule uh which, when isolated, according to the authors, and this is back in the 90s, um, smelled like had the very characteristic smell of uh meringue, which is egg whites, right? So and that turned out to be an aldehyde, nothing to do with crasol, but but an aldehyde.
So I think uh basically what we're what we're chasing after is some trace compound that science has not yet tracked down completely. I I don't understand why it is, and I'll have to to experiment with this. What why it is that the smell would smell uh would spread in a dishwasher, which is you know, probably it's probably alkaline conditions in there, and so that's probably gonna do something something to the chemistry and to the volatility of the traces that are still in there. But good question. Scrub steel, scrub steel has a similar smell.
So you know, you I can often confuse that egg smell with freshly scrubbed wet steel in a dishwashing situation. So I also wonder whether maybe there's some of that, you know. Yeah, that's interesting because the the smell of uh of uh fresh metal surface is uh has again been uh amazingly enough, carefully studied. And though those are very particular um aldehydes again and and ketones, uh so not related to amino acids at all, but to actually uh what you're smelling is not of course the metal, which is not volatile, but but uh volatile molecules that are generated by the contact of the soap molecules with the metal. So these are you know eight eight and ten carbon fragments uh that that we associate with the smell of metal because that's when we smell them, but it's not the metal itself, it's these other uh materials that come in contact with it.
Okay. So I have a question here uh from uh our friend uh up in Connecticut, Wowie Zawi, says, not exactly aromacentric, but would love to hear Harold's thoughts about a serious eats article on debittering olive oil. And I I looked it up. It's uh Nick Sharma, who's coming out with uh the flavor equation, the science of great cooking, uh, which is, I guess, due out this month, maybe already out for all I know. I haven't read it yet.
Basically takes olive oil and then to make emulsions that don't get bitter, he um puts a lot of hot water into it, which absorbs the polyphenols and then decocks it and then makes an emulsion with it. So I'm assuming that at that point you're like, why use the olive oil, right? I mean, I don't know. Why don't you just tell me what you think about that idea? If you've if you've read about it or heard about it.
That's exactly my reaction. Why bother using olive oil? Um so that that's a technique. You're you're what you're basically doing is um washing out non-oil materials from the oil by mixing it intimately with water and letting then letting the the oil and water separate from each other, pouring off the water, and then you're left with the oil, and it don't no longer has those traces of bitter and other compounds, including aromas. Um that's a technique that has been used for centuries, actually, uh, to take um rancid smelling oils and get rid of the rancidity.
Uh so you can find that uh that kind of procedure called for uh in books going way, way back. It does work, and I think Nick uh also recommends it when using mustard oil, which which can be bitter and is used a lot in in Indian cooking. But uh that's exactly my my question is if you're if you don't want the particular qualities of olive oil and mustard oil, and by the way, the the bitterness in olive oil is actually an indication of its um uh polyphenol content, which is associated with uh good things for our bodies, um, then what you're doing is basically taking away the molecules that give those oils their specific identities and qualities and perhaps health benefits, uh, in order to have a kind of blank background. And so you could do the same thing just by using canola oil. Yeah, yeah, right.
Uh, especially if you don't believe in any of these purported uh I guess you're saying even the health purported health benefits you'd be washed. All right, right. So why use it? Maybe you have a surfeit of olive oil lying around. You know what I mean?
Maybe you're swimming in olive oil and trying to find uses for it. Whatever. Uh, by the way, what percentage of olive oils do you think turn bad when you make a mayonnaise out of them? Uh sorry, which percentage of olive oils like get that like intensely bitter thing when you make mayonnaise out of them? My experience is that it really depends on how you make it.
So if you uh make the mayonnaise by hand, I find that you don't generally have a problem at all. It's when you use a blender. Uh and uh so my guess is it it maybe have has to do with uh the uh processing of the oil, the the size of the droplets, how much of the stuff that's inside the droplets gets exposed on the surface of the droplets. Uh that that might be what's causing the bitterness, but I I I think it it's um process dependent. This episode is brought to you by Wisetail.
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Terms and Conditions apply. Visit their website for more details. Alright, we have a question in from Rachel Meyer. I wonder whether that's the Rachel Meyer from Shoots and Roots. Uh interesting.
She asks, what's really behind smelling sweet? What does sweet smell mean? Ah, so that's uh really good question. I I have a couple of pages about that because um in the uh chemosensory world, uh in the world of people who who especially think about the the flavors of foods, it's often said that um talking about sweet smells is actually a mistake or a uh a kind of um uncalled for uh attribution to smells of something that's actually due to an association with a taste. So we say that vanilla has a sweet smell because we always encounter it in sweets.
And so we we make that unconscious uh association and we use that word for it. But my argument is that in fact, uh you know, if just go back to the Oxford English dictionary and look at the history of the use of the word sweet, it's used to mean pleasant uh way, way back, but long before it was associated very specifically with sugars. And I think that that uh there's a lot to be said for using the term sweet to mean uh soothing uh when it when it comes to smells. Um I'm talking about soothing smells, um, pleasant smells, uh smells that you know that you have pleasant associations with. Um flowers can swell can smell sweet and um uh and you know, we don't necessarily have a lot of experience with uh flowers, floral aromas in sweets.
Certainly in uh in some parts of the world there is that association, but for us not so much. So I think it's a perfectly useful word when describing smells. Uh it's very general, uh, but it it essentially means pleasant. What about in a related note? So, like honey, remember we used to do the demonstration together.
We you know, I guess John hasn't done it, but like Nastasi and you and I have done the demo many times where you um chew on or eat some umic acid, gymnemia silvestri leaves, it wipes out your your sense of sweet, and almost nothing tastes sweet, everything is ruined, exception being honey still tastes slightly sweet. I always assumed that that was an aroma situation that I was literally integrating in my mind as sweet, no. Um I you know, my guess with honey is because there's so many different sugars in there, you know, maybe something's getting by. You know, something's uh triggering a receptor that the gym isn't somehow blocking. That would be my guess.
Uh, but uh I think a good ex well, let's see. We've done, didn't we do marshmallows? And yeah, and they have some vanilla in them, and they were not so nice. So they're terrible. Yeah, yeah.
So it's foam right. My guess is it's it's the bizarre range of sugars that you find in in honey that that might be doing that. Uh I haven't done that in a long time because it's unpleasant. Yeah, my question in the chat. Okay.
Uh are there any moment. Are there any good resources on esters like a database? Uh specifically if you want to associate them with different spirits like rum or whiskey. Uh, and then he explains that he finds it strange he can't stand whiskey. It smells like used baby diaper.
Uh I'm a dad, he says. Uh whereas rum is like chocolate, vanilla, raisins, cola nut, and notes in between that can't play specifically. And he said he also throws in that he's one of those people for whom Cory undertastes smells like some sort of sober detergent. He wonders if there's a correlation. What are you feeding that baby?
You gotta get that baby to go to sleep somehow, you know. That's right. Yeah, my my father, when I was in my uh 30s with children, uh finally admitted to me that uh you know I was I was a regularly doped up as a as an infant to keep me quiet. So nice. What was that noise nostalgia?
Yes. I caught it as more of a well and I I now use that as an excuse for all kinds of things. So I see anyway. Brandy brandy baby brandy nice uh uh anyway so uh esters well so uh the the book does have uh a two-page spread of um the most common esters that are found in in food and drink um I'm not aware offhand of a uh a uh kind of specialty chart for spirits but I wouldn't be at all surprised if one didn't exist somewhere or other um make it sound so racy a two pace two page story okay uh the um uh when it comes to why it is that you experience whiskey uh the way you do and uh uh and possible correlation with your experience of coriander cilantro uh you know that's that's um an aspect of the the perception of uh of smells that i chose deliberately to ignore in the book because it it is so subjective and complicated and uh the book was going to be long enough if i just paid attention to what's out there whether or not or how we perceive it uh so uh i i can't can't really come up with a good explanation there and i'm not sure that uh that uh anyone else can at this point except to say that you know we we do all have different uh sets of receptors we all do have different processing uh circuits in our brain because those are are built by experience and um so uh i i would take it as an occasion to think back um to your infancy and early adulthood and and see if you can come up with any uh uh interesting associations from from your own life john you're not a whiskey guy do you get any uh diaper uh action out of your any baby poo out of your uh no i do not yeah i don't i just i don't know what about the flavor i guess i've never really taken the time to just like sit and think about why i dislike whiskey so much i just know i don't like it when i taste it well you told me it was a it was uh it was a mental thing because of a bad experience yes bad experience when i was young and silly i think that has to do with it yeah what happened i just graduated from high school, went down to jamaica with some friends and got in a hot tub with uh some jack daniels and some spaghettios. And needless to say, things did not go well.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Give me that, give me that, give me that trifecta again. You're in a hot tub. Spaghettios, Jack Daniels. I stole a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Well, I could afford spaghettios. Let's get in the hot tub. Is that how that went? Was that is that the gist? No, I don't I don't I don't really remember how it all happened.
It just was I remember the end of the evening. Um did not go well in the next day. I bet you do. Yeah. That's a that's a nice color floating on the top of that pool.
Yeah, well, thankfully made it into the bathroom. Not quite to the toilet, but yeah. Oh man. Uh Harold, you still have not listened to the Dead Milkman song, have you? Uh no, I have not.
These are a few of my many smells off of their smash hit album Beelzebubba. Okay. Thank you for reminding me. I will do that today. Yeah.
Yeah, come on. I'm sure you have one of the Spotifies or iTunes. I mean, it's not that it's a great song, but I mean, how many Dead Milkmen songs relate directly to uh you know a book that you've written. That's right. Yeah, you know.
The dead milk, I'm sure like none of you guys even remember who the dead milkmen were. Like that, you know, you might know them, uh, Bitch and Camaro and Punk Rock Gorilla were their two biggest songs. Anyways. Um Ashmitt writes in, hey Harold. Uh, and also he wishes us well, so that's nice.
Uh okay. Is my question is about the difference uh and taste in butter of different animals, cow and water buffalo. In India, I don't know if it's present in the US. The butter from a cow is much more aromatic and stronger tasting in a good way than the buffalo kind, which tastes fresher. I bought the two ties from the same brand, and the difference is still quite noticeable.
Both of them were uncultured, which removes the possibility of fermentation. Uh introduced uh diacetyl. Why do you think this? What do you think the disparity is? Is it related to the yellow hue of the cow kind, or is it simply because they are two different animals?
Uh am I thinking about this too much? And is this also the case in the United States? We don't get buffalo butter here in the United States. And I will throw into this an added thing if uh bonus points, Harold, if you can talk about camel milk. Well, I'm on the point of camel milk.
Um, I myself have not tasted it, but uh I was shopping at a wonderful grocery store in Sacramento called Corti Brothers, which I really want to take you guys to when that kind of thing becomes possible again. Um, and they actually had uh dehydrated camel milk and dehydrated horse milk. Uh so I bought uh a can of each. Uh it was expensive stuff. It's like you know, 30 bucks a can, something like that.
But I gave them to my daughter Florence, who is a uh who spends her weekends with horses. Uh that's uh kind of her avocation, is uh working at a horse ranch on weekends. And so I gave them to her as a kind of you know, stock uh oddball stocking stuffer. And um she was grateful for them, took them home and then we have the lockdown and I we haven't been together since so um I hope she still has them I will I will check and if she does then I'll uh I'll give you some notes on camel milk. All right and then we'll we'll read them on the air.
You can come back you know you don't have to wait until you come out with a book to come on the show by the way people enjoy when you come on but to to the buffalo to the buffalo cow and and uh does uh does the butter in the cows that they have in India differ from ours in an uncultured etc etc the whole regional so um cow's milk and water buffalo milk are very different and they're uh there's a page in the book about about that difference um they're different in in all kinds of ways uh just uh the water buffalo milk is much higher in protein and fat both uh but then the other thing about milk is that it it really does get a lot of its flavor from what the animal is eating uh and uh so it I think probably a big part of the the difference that the caller has experienced in between those two milks has to do with the the feed um the the milks themselves I mean you we can kind of get an idea of it here if we buy burrata for example, which you which is sometimes made with cow's milk, sometimes made with water buffalo milk uh and it's kind of you know on the on the edge between uh cheese and butter. And the they have very distinctive uh flavors, but it's um you know it's not not a huge difference. And I think if uh if uh there's a huge difference in India bet between those two, then it might have a lot to do with uh the the typical feet that they have. Well, we'll have to take a trip and find out once all this is over. That's that's gonna be our our mango trip, right?
Yeah, we're gonna go down to the south. Hey, look, I'm I'm game. We almost made it that one year. I forget what happened, you know. Um that because you have you still have your hookup, right?
Uh yeah, still have friends there, and uh they're they're happy to make arrangements for us. All right, well, as soon as uh we're allowed to. What's the season there? When's the when's the right? It's uh spring, late spring.
Yeah. Nice. All right. Yeah, yeah. All right.
Uh Miguel Cepeda wrote in, I have a rotary evaporator to distill things, and I have the aromas, and then I pass them on to my dishes, but it occurs to me to try to distill rusty metal nails to get those metallic aromas. And so this is gonna you spent a lot of time several places in the book talking about what actual aromas of things like metals are, so it's why this is apropos of the book. Um, to get those metallic aromas similar to the to the truffle, which you also spend a good deal of time on. And the question is can I obtain those aromas and flavors and are they safe to consume? If so, what temperature do you recommend using in the rotary evaporator uh to take care of the turpenoise?
But I wouldn't know what turpenoids would be present in there. But anyway, but so basically the distilling the smell of uh rusty nails. Right. I can kind of hear them clanking around as the uh as the rotor. In the tink tink tink tink yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um well, so those molecules are have been characterized and are well understood. And uh as I mentioned earlier, they're uh kind of medium-sized aldehydes and ketones, uh, about eight carbons uh long. And so those will have a very particular um volatility, uh, particular partial pressure uh with whatever solvent you're using. And uh so yeah, you can uh you should be able to get them uh and maybe even focus on them by getting the conditions just right. Uh no no terpenoids in rusty nails, but but again, what these molecules are are um uh organic molecules that are broken down by coming into contact with metals uh which are which are very reactive and and uh cause them to break down.
It's the same same thing that happens, you know, if you if you smell the keys uh in your pocket, uh it's the they they have the smell they do from the oils from your fingers that you've left on the keys when you've handled them. So it's not the the metal itself, it's the the other stuff that uh gets broken down by the metals. And would you say that those things are relatively temperature insensitive or should you go on the low side? Uh well they're so aldehydes and ketones are both kind of reactive. Um they're um so they're um probably going with the the lowest temperature you can is the best idea.
Yeah. Now, in you to you uh you have a section about the smell of earth again, you talk about it at the beginning, but you also talk about it close to the end of the book. And um, you know, the smell of just freshly wetted uh earth and dirt and concrete and whatnot being this kind of like blooming from carbon dioxide, like you know, they they the microbes come back to life, make carbon dioxide, it raises these volatiles. That's the gist of the argument, right? Uh huh.
Yeah. But what about the actual smell of curing concrete? Uh you got me. You know that smell when you walk past curing concrete? I'm trying to uh like so since this stuff is probably not volatile, and for those of you that have never had the pleasure of in the summer walking past a large amount of curing concrete, it has a very specific smell and a cooling effect.
I love it. I love walking past a big concrete port in the summertime. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had a uh a concrete driveway poured at our house uh decades ago.
And yeah, that was I like in I hadn't thought of it until this moment. Uh, but yeah, it's it's vivid. Uh and I have no idea. And I and uh I forget you write about this again in the book. Uh and you know, I used to know it back when we did the flavor exhibit at MoFad, but there there is a mental relationship in my head between curing concrete and green bananas, but I don't know what it I don't know what it is or whether that's just my brain playing with me or not.
Yeah, yeah. I'll figure it out. Actually, I won't figure it out. I'll never figure it out. I'll forget about it again until I ask you again in like 10 years' time.
Uh okay. Uh don't ask him too many stuffers. We got only, you know, like 10 minutes left. Also, Gur Gurin uh confirms that he too had a bad experience with whiskey, so his whole thing is suspect. I don't say suspect.
Look, a bad experience that you have is very real. I mean, all of this stuff's just mental. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
That's that's exactly why I chose not to write about it. Is that we all have different experiences, so we're all gonna have different experiences of food and drink and smells in general in the present. And uh so I just wanted to get out there uh what the stuff is that stimulates our perceptions, whatever those perceptions might be. I mean, you touch a little bit when you when you go into the kind of cilantro thing, right? It's like there are many people who where cilantro tastes like soap and yet they still like it.
Yeah. Or uh or they can it's it's maybe not their immediate reaction to it, but they can but they get it. They they can say, yeah, there is a soapy aspect to this, but it's also herbaceous and fresh and uh and nice. I would say delicious soap. That way if you're selling you gotta always be selling.
All right. Uh Devin Patel uh wrote in uh hello. Uh I've been on a quest for some time now trying to understand the flavor and uh uh uh aroma formation in coffee roasting. I'm not talking about classic coffee favors, uh flavors like uh furna furans or phenols, but the fruity esters, ketones, etc. Do you have any recommended readings on flavor formation caused from thermal degradation?
Oh my right in your wheelhouse here, Harold. Uh there is little info on the internet on the subject. Any help would be much appreciated. I'm assuming buy the book and then look at your bibliography section. Uh yeah, that would be that would be a good start.
Uh but I would also say um that you don't necessarily have to go to the book. These days, and I write about this in the bibliography section, that it's never been easier for anybody, including me, to find exactly this kind of information. You just have to get used to dealing with Google Scholar. But you just go to Google Scholar and you type in uh coffee and uh whatever particular notes you're interested in, uh, and up will come a list of the publications that have covered it. And then uh oftentimes those publications are behind paywalls, but the abstracts almost always contain the information that people like us are are interested in, which is you know, what are the the most important molecules and how are they formed?
Uh and then if you really want to get uh take a deep dive into the uh the science of it, uh then would you say a nose dive or even deeper? Uh then there are ways to get around the paywalls. But uh for the most part, you can you can find tons and tons of information these days. That's uh that's part of what kept me going for 10 years. We're allowed to talk about Sci Hub here in Ray.
Yeah, yeah. No one's gonna bother us about it. Yeah. Uh all right, uh Deep It writes in from Toronto. Hey, I have a question for Harold.
My partner cannot stand the smell of tequila. Uh fermented dairy, such as yogurt and sour cream and black vinegar. Uh, is there a common molecule that is present in all of these food or drinks that may be the culprit? I imagine lactic acid is a light, likely one, although not in the vinegar, but not sure whether tequila has any lactic acid in it. She has similar issues with mezcal, but finds the extremely smoky example examples tolerable, which is a flip.
Anyway, so uh any any commonalities there or just uh very disparate dislikes? Yeah, I'm um uh so if I had half an hour, I'd sit down and look at the charts that uh that contain that that uh have that information and look for a molecule that they they share in common. Offhand, I can't think of one because they are very different materials. Why, yeah, why does sour cream and yogurt smell somewhat acidic when though lactic acid is not volatile the way that acetic acid is. Well, is it just a mental action?
No, it's uh so that's a really interesting question. Uh lactic acid should should not be volatile. And yet, if you buy supposedly pure lactic acid and smell it, it does smell kind of dairy like. So uh my guess is that there are trace molecules associated with lactic acid uh that uh that are detectable uh that are really hard to get out of um uh you know uh lab preparations of things like lactic acid. But the other thing is that in the case of sour cream and and yogurt and things like that, um, lactic acid is uh certainly produced, but so are all kinds of other acids, including butyric acid, which uh in excess can be uh, well, let's see, butyric acid, if it's if it's uh kind of moderate amount, it's kind of cheesy.
If it's uh much more than moderate, then it really begin begins to get you know disgusted, grotting smelling. Uh Nastasi says the same thing about me. Uh traces of butyric acid just smell acidic. They they're you know a little bit like like uh vinegar, you know, but without the distinctiveness of vinegar. So there's a kind of sharpness that all the organic acids share uh because they they are volatile and they do what vinegar and CO2 and things like that do in our nose.
You know, they they hit our um uh our acid receptors or our this is this also gets complicated, uh acid receptors, but also pain receptors. Um so there are all kinds of things in dairy in fermented products in general that give us that kind of sharp acidic hit. So the outlier so far is is tequila, which I don't know enough about the stuff in it to tell you like but I'm sure uh all right, yeah. I was just gonna say uh tequila, of course, is also a uh a concentrated fermented product, and so I wouldn't be surprised if maybe there was uh an acidic component that uh the caller is just especially uh sensitive to. All right, all right.
We got two last. I'm gonna rip through it. We're gonna do it, Matt. It's gonna happen. Okay, I'll set the two minute timer.
Ready? Okay, it's gonna take me two minutes to read this question. Hold on. From yes, um Harold, by the way, what Nastasia's doing is he's gonna set a two-minute timer. So you have two minutes to answer these next two questions, all right?
All right. From John Secort via email. Uh hey everybody, and Harold. Uh, I feel like this might be a good question for Harold. I recently made Cachio Pepe.
Say that say say Cachio Pepe for me. I love it. Catchy Pepe. You usually say it. You should not do it.
She turned off. She muted it. I am muted because my Airbnb person was like talking to me. Oh, did you ask them why they didn't install a bathroom in their house? Did you hear me ask them that?
No. Well, then I didn't. Well, I didn't hear all of it because you muted. Remember? Yes.
And if and if I had asked him that question, you think it would have been like a two-second answer that we would have would have given me. Nah, we skipped it. Okay, cool. Bye. I mean that that checks out.
Anyway. Uh, why no turtlet? Goodbye. Anyway, um, I recently made Cachio Pepe and the recipe calls to toast and quotes the ground uh the ground the ground black pepper in the pan for a few minutes. This certainly releases some very wonderful aromas, but I'm curious as to what it does to the overall flavor of the pepper.
Uh another pepper question. I recently had a Caesar dressing with a lot of pepper that had a very mild black pepper flavor, and I'm a feeling they muted the sharper flavors by cooking beforehand. I know that Dave has cooked mustard cheese and garlic in a pressure cooker, but what do you think would happen if you cook pepper? And um, and then there's uh another section on yay toast and brin brunos, but we'll deal with that later because uh we'll talk about that because unless Harold has a burning desire to talk about brown Scandinavian cheeses. Uh go pepper.
Okay. Okay, cheeses are all yours. Um Pepper. So uh whenever you toast spices, you're doing a couple of things. One is that you are uh helping to release the the aromas because the aromas are are held in um you know little cellular containers, and those need to be broken open before we can uh detect the the volatiles that they contain.
But then the other thing is that um that wonderful smell that you're getting as you toast them is going up into the kitchen air and out of the pepper. So uh the pepper may end up having much less flavor than it did to begin with, uh depending on how long you've toasted it. So just be aware of the fact that that's the case, that you're on the one hand liberating aromas and to some extent creating them uh with uh high temperature, uh, but you're also losing them at the same time. And so my my advice would be to use a mixture of fresh ground and toasted, and then you'll get the best of both. All righty.
Uh well, that's always like like uh, you know, Jeffrey Steingart used to say, why do you add pepper at the beginning? Yeah, but I'm just adding something. It's the he's already answered, it's over. So uh like uh added the beginning and at the end. I think I like a I like a double pepper addition.
Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I do too. Yeah, yeah. Uh because I like the bitterness, but then I also like the aroma.
Kind of like hops. You know, you had some for the bitterness and some for the aroma. Anyway. No, remember we started talking about something else, and then I said that I was gonna talk about something else. Anyway, uh Brian writes in and would like maybe I think Harold's gonna be the most important, but then you know, invites us to weigh in, which is very nice.
Brian from Minneapolis. My question for Harold uh for the new book, Nosedive is what's the best and worst thing you smelled while doing research for your book? Uh this question could also go for anyone else on the show. That's a tough one. Um two two minutes of silence, how about that?
Well, uh, you know, I did feel obliged because it the the book covers uh smells good and bad, I did feel obliged to pay very close attention to uh excreta of all kinds. And uh there uh I did it for the book. I wouldn't um willingly do it again. Uh most pleasant um that's tough. Wait so like how many different kinds of poop are you talking about?
When whenever and whatever I would come across we've we've had uh a raccoon infestation recently for example so all right how does raccoon poo smell as opposed to it's they're omnivores you know so it's it's um not not as bad as after uh uh a human being for example has a a nice big steak uh the steak poo that's the worst thing you're saying that you smelled for the book is this worse than the surstroming oh that's uh well but the uh Sir Stroming yeah that's right up there that's right up there but you know that's something you can eat and then so that's got a different kind of valence to it you know it it is something that you can uh sort of appreciate in a in a different sort of way one can eat it yes yeah yeah so uh Nastasi you were there for that one when Harold was like this one's not as good because it doesn't also have that sous vomit we because like the one that we brought back, it's like didn't have quite enough of a vomiting note for Harold to say it was the true the the the height of Sir Stroming. Well, it was it that was only my second Sir Stroming. The first one did have much more uh you know, uh the the vomit, uh the baby poop, uh the it it just had a richer palette of aromas than the one you got. And so what's the best? Was agar wood really great?
That's pretty that's pretty wonderful. Uh I would say that the the incense materials in general, which I had not known anything about until I started working on the book. And uh thankfully Mandy Aftel, the perfumer in Berkeley, uh, you should look her up uh at Aftelier. She has a collection of these amazing natural materials, um incense woods and resins and gums and uh ambergris and civet and they're uh they are out of this world. So I I began to understand why it is that they were used and valued as much as they were.
All righty. So the non uh the non-Herold questions have been uh postponed until next week, the week after that. We're not gonna have a show because election and it's gonna give all of us adjudice, so we're not gonna do a show. Uh the book when is the book available right now, or do they have to wait before they go by? It should be on shelves and in stores right now.
Remember to buy the American version with the incense on the front and not the British version with the Erlenmeyer. Did you go through and change all the spellings of all the words of like labor and color and flavor? Nope. That that would be up to the English publishers, and I think they just uh took took the same plates as the American edition. Well, thank goodness for that.
Uh the book is Nosedive, a field guide to the world smells. But I I didn't, I just did it with a normal voice at the time. Nosedive. Like I you haven't decided how you want me to read it. Anyway, the book is nosedive.
Uh available at fine uh booksellers uh anywhere. Uh Harold McGee, thanks so much, as usual, and hope to see you in the real life when all this COVID nonsense is done. Yes, yes. Can't can't wait. It's been way too long.
Can't you wait? Can't you wait, Harold, to do another big party and dress up like Zoltar? Well, if if if we can have uh, you know, toppling grills and uh everything that we had that that time, sure, anytime. Yes. For sure, right, Dave?
Always. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but at this time I want him to just dress as a giant nose, like the uh like the um well, whose short story is that the nose is dressed as a giant nose. Yeah, Google, yeah, the nose. Yeah.
And then we'll only play uh parliament. I am the nose. Devoid of funk. That one, you know what I and I will never dance, and we'll just do that the whole time, and like so you can be dressed as a giant nose in the parliament outfit would be amazing. Yes, I like that.
That's good. That's the next, that's the next one. We would have done that for your book release party if we weren't in COVID. If we weren't in COVID times, but for those of you like when we do our next museum, uh whatever it's called, Nastasia will make sure that that happens. And so you will get to see Harold dressed as a nose in a parliament outfit.
Like if you come if you you know shell out for the next uh California Mofad event, once we're all allowed to have these sorts of things again. Would you say it's accurate, Nastasia? Absolutely. Laying down the foundation now. Laying it's laying it down.
Well, she's sitting there stewing in to in beautiful Topanga. Other than last week when I was like, I don't really want to let people know where I'm staying. And you were like, okay. Does everybody remember that? Do I just want to be clear?
Or is it a red herring? Are you not into Mango Canyon? And Dave is just leading them astray. No. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not that smart. Great. Anyways. Uh and oh, by the way, California people. Is the air mellowed out yet?
Can you see again? Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's it's fine. Fine at the moment. Yeah.
All right, good. All right. Well, anyway, uh, best to everyone and Harold. Hopefully, again, see you soon. Bye, nosedive cooking issues.
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