Ammonium chloride tastes like nothing else. It may be the sixth basic taste
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Kokumi - the presence of broken down amino acid chains common in aged protein products such as blue cheese or dry aged beef https://www.fooddive.com/news/kokumi-the-sensation-that-make...
Oleogustus - the presence of certain lipids that in small amounts may make foods taste richer but may in fact be a way for us to detect rancid fats that we shouldn't ingest https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q3/research-co...
> They found that ammonium chloride triggers a specific proton channel called OTOP1 in sour taste receptor cells. This sates a key requirement for a flavor to qualify as a primary taste.
That makes it sound like it's part of sour, not something new. And that seems kind of confirmed, by the report of it being "sharp and sour", before salmiak's other flavors also kicked in:
> “The first time I sampled salmiak… I spit it out on a Copenhagen street corner. It wasn’t that this powerful little pastille was bad. It’s just that my taste buds had never quite been lit up that way: smacked with a layer of sharp and sour salt dust, then soothed by something bitter and caramel-sweet. It felt simultaneously fascinating and… abusive? Or at least odd, like a knocked funny bone.”
Everything else is flavor provided by the nose, not the tongue, as far as I know. And it's combined with texture and mouthfeel, but those aren't strictly taste.
I'm asking here, how is ammonium chloride any different from sour on the tongue?
Apparently the flavour by smell is somewhat of a myth
For others: the video explains that not only does our tongue not merely detect a single "bitter" but rather ~25 distinct versions of "bitter", but that it also seems to respond to flavors that were previously believed to only have an olfactory response.
And so that definitely answers my question as to how ammonium chloride might simultaneously be picked up by what we classify as sour receptors, but also might be a different kind of sour. But at the same time, the article still provides nothing to suggest it is a "sixth" basic taste -- e.g. if we detected 10 kinds of sour (I'm making that number up) it might be an 11th type?
https://youtu.be/sR8M4zARBXY?t=462
Here's a simple test you can try yourself: put some food in your mouth and hold your nose. What do you taste? Now do it again with your nose not blocked. Try this for various foods.
I got this from Science and Cooking: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Cooking-Physics-Homemade-Cuis...
The first chapter talks about how aroma is a component of flavor and you can use this test to identify if your ingredients are giving you taste (tongue) or aroma molecules (nose)
And then we figured out how to make stuff that's even sweeter and more energy-dense than fruit, so it tastes even better and we eat loads of it even though we're not starving hunter-gatherers and don't the extra energy at all. But that didn't play into our evolutionary process.
Of course sweet isn't the only flavor we crave. I don't know exactly what combination of tastes makes meat appealing, but the fact that there's no single "meat" taste doesn't mean we didn't evolve to crave it. It just means that's the chemical pathway that our taste buds happened to follow.
(Sweet things indicate easily broken down sugars, a sub-category of energy rich)
[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/humans-...
Since when is umami a new real flavor and not just a marketing term?
> Umami was first scientifically identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda,[27][28] a professor of the Tokyo Imperial University. He found that glutamate was responsible for the palatability of the broth from kombu seaweed. He noticed that the taste of kombu dashi was distinct from sweet, sour, bitter, and salty and named it umami.[16]
> Professor Shintaro Kodama, a disciple of Ikeda, discovered in 1913 that dried bonito flakes (a type of tuna) contained another umami substance.[29] This was the ribonucleotide IMP. In 1957, Akira Kuninaka realized that the ribonucleotide GMP present in shiitake mushrooms also conferred the umami taste.[30] One of Kuninaka's most important discoveries was the synergistic effect between ribonucleotides and glutamate. When foods rich in glutamate are combined with ingredients that have ribonucleotides, the resulting taste intensity is higher than would be expected from merely adding the intensity of the individual ingredients.[14]
umami is more complex- it's usually a combination of several amino acids and nucleosides. MSG on its own, or nucleosides on their own barely taste like much, while umami is ... quite rich.
Go find some Kombu (https://www.justonecookbook.com/kombu/), soak it in water and then take a sip. Literally pure Glutamate aka Umami.