Goro-goro — Describing texture
Texture is half the food equation, maybe more. Texture is a common complaint among friends who tell me they just don’t like tomatoes (I love tomatoes and my continued new year’s resolution is to eat more of them). Texture in food is a critical frontier because it forms the first impressions of a food and plays a significant role in how flavour is released and foods are actually tasted. Full disclosure, I’m also passionate about texture because I spent two years studying rheology (roughly speaking, the study of texture) which can be extremely tedious, frustrating, and occasionally rewarding.
One thing that makes texture difficult is just how challenging it is to describe. Compared to flavor, texture involves a lot more words and a lot fewer comparisons. Think about describing a wine’s bouquet or taste. Most descriptors are actually common flavors themselves — apple, melon, passion fruit, pine. We can often build flavor profiles by combining discrete notes that are individually easy to communicate. Many of these notes even refer to specific molecules that can be analyzed with tools like gas chromatography. But what about texture? Texture is not a directly additive phenomenon (neither is flavor in many complex ways but that’s another subject). It’s a composite of different properties that sometimes add, subtract, juxtapose, or don’t interact at all. Texture is in the bones of a food. As food scientists, we use lots and lots of different and sometimes conflicting words to describe texture. Is it: Slimy? Firm? Elastic? Yielding? Springy? Gummy? Toothpacking? Crumbly? Mealy? Hard? The list goes on, but words often have two meanings. Analyzing food texture in a lab is complex too and there are myriad different set-ups and fixtures to measure dozens of different, complex textural attributes.
Japan seems to be ahead here and has a remarkable language ready to describe and communicate texture. A few years ago, a Japanese chocolatier released this series of chocolates (http://www.nendo.jp/en/works/chocolatexture-2/), each meant to exemplify a different, very specific textural attribute. For some reason (which is probably apparent to Japanese speakers) every one is a repeated double word.
1. “tubu-tubu” Chunks of smaller chocolate drops.
2. “sube-sube” Smooth edges and corners.
3. “zara-zara” Granular like a file.
4. “toge-toge” Sharp pointed tips.
5. “goro-goro” Fourteen connected small cubes.
6. “fuwa-fuwa” Soft and airy with many tiny holes.
7. “poki-poki” A cube frame made of chocolate sticks.
8. “suka-suka” A hollow cube with thin walls.
9. “zaku-zaku” Alternately placed thin chocolate rods forming a cube.
I don’t think English has anything so specific.
A big part of my work is finding ways to build texture out of insect proteins. (It’s a topic for another discussion, but food proteins play and enormous role in food texture). Getting feedback and comparing results depends on some scientific instruments but often the most important test is tasting and being exhaustively descriptive.
Try it next time you’re eating something. Think about all the descriptive words you can to describe a food’s flavour and texture as you eat it. When we put names to things we often surprise ourselves with what we find.
Is there something about food that’s bugging you? Do you have a question about a product or ingredient that’s getting a lot of buzz? Comment with questions or ideas you’d like to see covered or discussed!
