#9: Sgt Pepper is Lonely...

...because few understand what peppers are for.

Salt and pepper are soulmates. They are meant to be together in almost every savory dish. Although we know what salt is for, why do you think there is pepper? 

This is my attempt to put together my knowledge, logic, assumptions and articulations to put meaning in these taken-for-granted granules.

Salamat sa glamour shot ng mga pamintang ito Amiel!

Let me start by explaining how the art/science of tasting occurs. When we eat, we don’t just enjoy the taste of the food through our tongue. Our tongue is limited to only four sensations: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter (well, a network was paid to preach that there is also a fifth taste called umami *raise eyebrows*). What gives any food its dimensions, the roundness, or richness is its aroma or what we call in tagalog, langhap. Take the sentence "Namnamin mo ang pagkain." It’s a call to enjoy your food by really immersing your self in its taste. The word namnam is actually an onomatopoeia of the movement of the mouth which helps transport or get the aroma of the food to our nose, thus maximizing the taste of what were eating. We’ll get the langhap if we make namnam the food.(BWAHAHAHAHAHA!)

Try mo. Namnamnamnamnamnamnam. Hehe.

The aroma of the food we are chewing travels from the mouth to the nasal cavity. It’s kind of smelling the food from inside our mouth. That is why anything tastes bland if we’re down with a bad cold. Our sense of smell is not working, hence, we don’t experience the aroma of our food. Eat caldereta with a cold and it will just be boringly salty and sour. But once our olfactory sense works, we start noticing the hint of liver, the juice of the beef, the toasted garlic and sautéed onions, the slightly earthy sweet smell of peanut butter, even the crisp whiff of green bell peppers. In the same manner, (this is gonna be a distasteful turn) we say, “Lasang ipis yung kanin” (The rice tastes like cockroaches.) even if we fully know that we haven't eaten eat ipis yet to know how they actually taste. We just know how they smell. Yet we still say lasang ipis, because the nasal cavity registers the cockroach smell.

Now the concept of mint. (I thought this entry is gonna be easy but I’m starting to have a hard time now…) We all know that the pepper is sort of minty, even hot, in large proportions. The minty sensation, as we experience in toothpastes and chilies, is not a taste. I’m being redundant here but it is actually a sensation, a feeling that sticks to our skin, and in the case of our nose and mouth, our mucous membranes. That’s why when we eat something hot, we can’t easily wash it down with water because it is an irritation of our mucous membranes. After brushing our teeth, the mint, stays in our mouth, in our nasal cavity, even after we rinse our mouth.

What I think the pepper does is, it gives the dish that subtle minty element. Whether it’s the sharp sweet bouquet of the langka (jackfruit) or the rich barky (? - here barky, barky!) milky flavor of gata (coconut milk), the pepper pushes the aromas to stick to our nasal cavity a little longer so the taste experience will be more lingering. However few the specks of pepper in your soup, it pushes the flavor from fleeting to lasting. Without pepper, any savory dish would’ve been …flat. The great thing about this is, even if you don’t see all the pepper-specks, you know they’re there, making your experience richer than it is supposed to be.

I dedicate this entry to my pepper-speck friends. Very few, sometimes even invisible but they are the ones that make the difference. I think you know who you are. :-D