How can I get better at tasting food?

One can and should focus on the skill of tasting.

After a long respite, I am returning to blogging about food with a new interest and focus: How can one learn to taste better? Let's use the world of wine as a metaphor. Serious oeneophiles learn how to appreciate wine. They bring an approach, a language, experience and sometime training to a glass of wine. I think - and they believe - that when we share a bottle, they actually perceive more with each mouthful than I do. Also, when they want to experience more, do they go try and make a bottle of wine? No, they learn more about how to taste wine and they experiment with the range of tastes that exist. There are also recommendations that help them try new tastes based upon their existing preferences.

So I love to eat and I get a great deal of enjoyment from cooking, what can I do so that I can actually perceive more tastes? Can I perceive more in a given food: what are the different flavors in a coffee or a chocolate? Also, are there tastes that I have not yet tasted that are worth tasting?

I want to understand if I can do some simple things that will help me perceive and enjoy foods. So here are a few topics to start:

• How does the anatomy of tasting work and how can I help it work better?
• How can I tell how much of the spectrum of taste I am actually experiencing?
• What is normal and what are the ranges of ability to perceive different tastes?
• How can we talk about taste and tasting? What are the dimensions of taste: texture, aroma, etc.
• What are some simple things to improve my ability to taste - and let's experiment with them: breathing strips, chewing longer, palate cleansers and other things that help me to perceive tastes and smells better.
• What can we learn from sensory professionals about tasting?
• How does the world of sensory testing talk about taste and food? What is the taxonomy and how can we talk about the dimensions of taste?
• How can we map the world of tastes to know where we've gone, and perhaps more importantly, where we haven't?

Photo credit: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2006