Taste the Rainbow

So...Carl and I had a pretty thrilling evening last night, and yes--there was a blindfold involved. Bell peppers as well.

It was my idea this time. Inspired by a recent episode of "Top Chef" in which the contestants had to put together seven courses of food, getting progressively hotter on the Scoville scale (the measure of hotness of spicy peppers, with jalapenos scoring around 5,000 and Carolina Reapers around 2,000,000), I put together a little tasting test for Carl and me. I used peppers, but not spicy ones. 

Curious about the taste differences among different colors of bell peppers, I bought one each of the four most common colors: green, yellow, orange, and red. Without tasting them ahead of time, both of us (blindfolded) tasted all four and then tried to identify the tasting order. 

Our senses of sight cut off, we definitely focused more on the smell, taste, and crunch of each pepper. I was actually amazed how different they are, some keeping their flavor more buttoned up and others being very generous with sweetness and even perceived salt. I'd recently charred red peppers for use in a dinner recipe and had been impressed by how fun that process was and how versatile the skinned roasted peppers are. Without any "control," however, our perceptions of the four colors/flavors were subjective, each pepper judged on its probable position within the rainbow-colored lineup. Would I be able to taste red?

We ran through the lineup twice and got slightly different results each time. The most intense moment for me was when, the second time through, the use of the blindfold actually started to mess with my sensory organization. Because my eyes were open but I couldn't see, I felt sort of "off." After tasting the four colors blindly and making my guesses, I panicked a little and told Carl to wait. I relaxed into the impressions that had just been made and all of the sudden I could literally SEE that the order I'd told him was wrong. With more clarity, I could see they'd stacked up as:

GREEN: closed off, vegetal
YELLOW: slightly more juicy, slightly sweet
ORANGE: slightly salty; juicy and full of flavor
RED: the sweetest one

I told him my new guesses (the pepper order was random), and all four were correct. 

Synesthesia is when impressions between two or more different senses interact with each other, like being able to hear music or see flavors. While I don't consider myself a full synesthete, I've been interested in the idea for a long time, because when I was a child I really did have mixed sense impressions, knowing (for instance) that every letter of the alphabet had a definite color. While this has faded somewhat over the years, last night with peppers on the tongue and a blindfold on the eyes, I had a clear sense of how amazing sense perceptions can really be.​

After the experiment, Carl and I expanded our appetizers, sipped the wine for the occasion (our versatile, fruity 2024 Pinnacle Ridge Dry Riesling), and talked about our experiences, which had been very different. Carl told me about how this kind of "relative" tasting is exactly what he does when Lucien Guillemet (his Bordeaux winemaking colleague and consultant) makes his annual visit to work through blend tasting trials together. Carl was thinking that doing a LITERALLY blind tasting of those blends in the future might prove helpful, since he's aware that he tastes things more effectively with the other sense "closed." Whereas I needed the colors to show me the way to the flavors, he was happy not being distracted. 

Interestingly, we both agreed that the pepper with the best and most balanced taste on its own was the orange one!

I did a bit of research later and found out that all bell peppers begin as green peppers, then turn colors as they ripen, depending on the variety of pepper. So the green pepper I'd selected could have eventually turned into one of the other colors--though we'll never know which! This spring I'd like to look for purple bell peppers. Can you imagine--a peck of purple pickled peppers?

Cheers to the many senses and colors of good taste!