When describing what a fruit tastes like, do you have a set of fruit primitives? Like a sort of fruit primary colors that are used to explain other fruit..
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@ZachWeinersmith Not a culinary authority, I tend to describe fruit taste in dimensions of "soft", "mush", "plep", "sweet", "gnudgy", "bitter", "sour", "hard".
Lemon tastes "sour". Lime tastes "sour and hard". Pears taste "squishy". Apples taste "hard". Hackberries are "gnudgy".
@ZachWeinersmith I find this thread is pretty revealing as to whether participants are lumpers or splitters.
@ZachWeinersmith I tend to start with the big stuff, texture, sweetness, astringency, acidity, often citric/malic/ascorbic if I can differentiate those.
For smaller stuff (the flavor notes that make fruit actually taste good) I find myself with the same problem as with smell, which is that it's way too high-dimensionality. If I'm lucky I can draw analogies to other fruits but in most cases it is more like wine tasting notes than color mixing.
@ZachWeinersmith depends on the fruit. To take a popular example, I understand that for durian, you need to import concepts not usually invoked for fruit, like "unwashed gym socks".
@ZachWeinersmith
"fruit primitives" is a peak weinersmith phrase 😂
@ZachWeinersmith You can purchase laboratory standard reference fruit from NIST. https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductList?cartID=&portalUser=&store=&cclcl=en_US&operation=quickSearch&searchText=Fruit
I'm partial to the standard Blueberry, but at $120/5g pouch, I save it as a little treat.
@ZachWeinersmith oh for sure. citrus (I guess lemon if I had to be specific), grape, coconut strike me as a decent set of primaries, as a sour, sweet, warm
@ZachWeinersmith I've never thought about it, especially since I so rarely have to describe the taste of new fruits, but just to mess with people I'm going to try "tastes like chicken" from now on.
@ZachWeinersmith it’s going to shock me if I get to be the first to share this with you, but here is a math paper titled Taxonomy of citrus fruits https://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~frettloe/papers/zitrustaxonomie.pdf
@ZachWeinersmith the problem with trying to build an additive model of fruit is that durian falls outside most gamuts
@ZachWeinersmith Maybe something like Berry, citrus, apple, tropical. Those are probably my big four. But they are def not as versatile as actual primary colors.
@ZachWeinersmith only in an abstract categorical sense like "citrussy". Not in a primary color way like "orange is literally a mixture of red and yellow"
