How does one describe food? What words come to mind first? Perhaps taste—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami—the building blocks of flavor. Perhaps aroma—the unmistakable scent of alliums being sauteed in butter, or the distinctive smells of spices from around the world. Even appearance (worth another blog post entirely) stands out immediately. But as I'm sure you can tell already by the title, today's discursion is about none of these attributes. Texture, I'd like to argue, is in fact one of the essential features of food that frequently gets overlooked in favor of the previously mentioned ones. Texture is what makes food interesting, distinctive, and pleasurable to eat! Imagine for a moment having to listen your whole life to only pieces played on piano (or even worse, a MIDI synthesizer). Without the ability to hear the timbres of the orchestra music seems (and sounds) awfully limiting. In the same way, food without textural contrast becomes cumbersome, tiring.
I'd like to first discuss some aspects of texture in food, hopefully to
give a better sense of how to appreciate it and practically consider its
role while cooking. In my experience, cuisines such as Chinese food have a
much more refined sense of texture and greater appreciation for its
variety than we do here in the United States. Just to give a few examples:
in Shanghainese, a term frequently used to describe food is
One can find the same appreciation for unusual texture in other cuisines.
In Western (American) cooking, maintaining the crispness of fried foods is
of utmost importance. Recently, I was at lunch with some friends at a
Mexican restaurant where they served chilaquiles, a common breakfast dish
consisting of tortilla chips simmered in salsa (red or green, usually) and
topped with eggs along with other accoutrements. At first it might seem
utterly pointless to fry tortilla chips until crunchy and then soak them
in a sauce until they soften again, but there is a method to the madness,
so to say. Because (deep-)frying dehydrates food
J. Kenji Lopez Alt
has a really good explanation of this process.
so effectively, it essentially allows greater penetration and absorption
of flavors in the sauce. Furthermore, the tortilla chips, if made
properly, maintain after frying a subtle "crunch" unlike that of a fresh
chip.
Interestingly this textural phenomenon I like to call "soggy fried" food
shows up elsewhere. Another popular dish in Mexico is chiles rellenos,
consisting of poblano peppers stuffed with cheese, battered,
Completely unrelated, but a really fun part of most chiles
rellenos
recipes
is that they ask you to beat the whites separately into a semi-meringue
for the batter to obtain a light, airy coating.
fried, and then dunked in a tomato-based salsa. For more variations upon
the "soggy fried" theme, we can look to Japan, where katsudon takes a
freshly-fried pork cutlet (tonkatsu) and then puts it into a savory broth.
In Shanghainese there are countless variations of things (fish,
vegetables, meat) being deep-fried or pan-fried and then simmered in
soy sauce and sugar. All of these take an already
texturally interesting dish (fried food) and then play with it, adding
another layer of flavor and metamorphosing the original into something
radically different, yet equally compelling.
For the second part of this post, I want to pivot and talk about something I've never written about, wine—in particular its texture. What does that even mean, given that wine is just a liquid made from fermenting grape juice? As with food, we tend to focus on the aromas and flavors when describing a wine. But now consider its tactile sensation. To prime your brain, imagine the difference between a crisp white wine (say, Sauvignon Blanc) and a rich, mouth-filling Chardonnay. Clearly there is some aspect of texture at play in distinguishing them, beyond the variation in taste and smell.
As a concrete example, let's compare the sensation of drinking skim milk to whole milk to heavy cream. Of course many people would be put off by even the thought of chugging a glass of heavy cream, due to its cloying richness. However, skim milk feels almost like water on the tongue, and whole milk somewhere in between. Although all taste like dairy, they differ significantly in their viscosity, that mouth-coating quality achieved by milkfat and which makes desserts like ice cream so appealing. We can apply the same analysis to varying kinds of wine. In fact, I want to argue that, as with food, the textural experience of consuming wine is as important if not more important than its flavors or aromas.
When I think about describing texture in a glass of wine, there are
typically three (or four) components which stand out: acid, tannin, and
alcohol (as well as carbonation for sparkling wines). The acidity of wine
is inherent from the grapes and lends not only the associated sour flavor,
but varying sensations ranging from pricklyness to roundness. Tannin (or
what people often refer to as "dryness") is caused by phenolic compounds
leeched from the grape seeds, skins, and possibly from wooden barrels
which are used in producing the wine. These phenolic compounds, which
comprise a
staggering range
of chemical structures, are the same as those giving tea its pleasant
astringency (or unpleasant, if you've steeped your black tea too long).
Astringency is simply the sensation of dryness or chalkiness on the tongue
caused by tannins binding to proteins in your saliva and aggregating.
Alcohol, on the other hand, contributes body or viscosity to wine (think
of the skim milk/heavy cream comparison).
To be more precise, it is typically glycerol, a byproduct
of alcoholic fermentation which contributes most to viscosity and
appears as the "legs" of wine which run down the side of your glass when
you swirl it. It turns out that ethanol is only slightly more viscous
than water at room temperature, where as glycerol is much more.
High-alcohol wines will frequently feel denser and thicker on the palate,
whereas lower-alcohol wines tend to feel lighter.
Another factor which contributes to body/viscosity that I
don't discuss here is (residual) sugar. At low levels, it is often
barely noticeable, but for very sweet dessert wines (e.g.
Pedro Ximenez sherry
or
Tokaji Aszu) the insane levels of sugar can make the wine syrupy.
Finally, for completeness, I'll note that carbonation is a hugely
important textural feature, at least for wines which have it. If you
compare a can of freshly-opened soda to one that has been lying around and
become flat, the difference is immense. The experience of drinking
champagne simply wouldn't feel the same with those celebratory bubbles and
the refreshing, invgorating aspect the carbonation brings.
I want to briefly touch on a topic which appears as the object of
controversy when discussing wine: minerality. In the context of texture,
people often report "rocky," "flinty," or related adjectives describing
wines possessing so-called "minerality." Many winemakers seem to belive
that these flavors and tactile sensations are inherently derived from the
soil where grapes are grown—limestone and chalk soils are presumed to
yield expressions of those minerals directly in the wine produced.
However, it is undoubtedly true that only trace amounts of the minerals
from the soil end up in the actual wine itself, and those that do are
disassembled into their constituent ions, which certainly do
My theory for what people actually taste, insofar as it relates to our
current discussion of texture, is varying
That was a long digression, but it does lead naturally into a few points I
wanted to make about acidity and texture in wine. A key idea is that there
is no one expression of acidity in a wine, and various kinds of acid you
can find contribute distinctive characters not only to the taste but also
to the texture. Perhaps the clearest example I can give is that of malic
and lactic acid. Malic and lactic acid are both what are known in organic
chemistry as "carboxylic acids," meaning they contain the "COOH" group.
If you remember some basis chemistry, acids are compounds
which can donate a proton (H+). Carboxylic acids donate the terminal H+
on their COOH group to yield carboxylates, which have a COO- group.
Malic acid is tarter and more crisp tasting,
In fact the root of malic acid is the Latin
whereas lactic acid is softer and rounder, reminiscent of butter.
Lactic is from Latin
When grapes are initially picked and fermented into wine, they mostly
contain higher levels of malic acid, thus contributing a crisper, cleaning
kind of acidity.
However, winemakers frequently subject the initial juice to
malolactic fermentation, converting malic acid to lactic acid by
means of bacteria.
For the chemistry-inclined, malolactic fermention involves
a decarboxylation, where one of the carboxyl COOH groups on malic acid
is released as carbon dioxide. The bacteria which perform malolactic
fermentation can generate ATP in this process, analogous to the
metabolism of sugar into ethanol via alcoholic fermentation.
The conversion changes a bright, crisp wine into one much richer and
fuller in texture. A great comparison for this is varying methods of
vinifying Chardonnay. In some regions, notably Chablis (a part of
Burgundy), it is typical to suppress malolactic fermentation and retain
that green-apple character and biting texture of Chardonnay. Due to the
famous limestone soils of Chablis, people have taken to defining Chablis'
distinct texture as "flinty" (though here with the caveats of the previous
paragraph). On the other hand, many Chardonnays produced in California,
such as in the Santa Ynez Valley, undergo malolactic fermentation (among
other processes) to produce a rich, sometimes almost oily-textured wine.
I could go on for much longer about the fascinating attributes of tannin, sugar, and carbonation in wine, but I think this is probably sufficient for an introduction. If anything, I hope you come away from this with an enhanced appreciation of (and even a conscious desire to concentrate on) texture in food and wine.