edibleflavor-

Edible Flavor Vehicles
Food seems complicated. Our modern cuisine is a lush canopy held up by branching centuries of farming, opportunity, culture and globalization, all combining to form the meal before you. How did these ingredients come to be prepared in this way? In a fashion that we find delicious? It is a difficult question, one with a long, meandering answer.

Just as accurately, though, food is very simple. There are flavors, which taste good, and there are edible vehicles to transport those flavors. That’s about it. Some foods straddle the fence in-between, but many clearly fall into one or the other, flavors or vehicles.

The flavors category is difficult to analyze because flavor is somewhat subjective. This guy has a sweet tooth, that gal loves umami, dorkus here is a fiend for the sour stuff, etc. We’ve all heard it a million times. The vehicles category, on the other hand, can be more readily broken down into its component parts and objectively ranked. Which is our task today.