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I'd like to say I'm good at cooking. I understand each element of the cooking process well, I can imagine flavours and how ingredients will alter the flavour of a dish. I believe I can put together really flavourful meals and (not trying to humble brag here) receive a lot of compliments for my cooking. However, I would say I'm pretty bad at identifying flavours. If someone presents me with a dish and asks me to identify the ingredients, I can get a few of them but in general I miss a bunch.

Why would it be the case that, being able to understand how ingredients change a flavour, I cannot identify the ingredients that produced the flavour? That is to say, how can it come about that someone can be a competent cook yet not pick out flavours from a plate? And how can I improve this skill?

e god
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    Welcome to SA! Your question is interesting but it's a bit vague. Can we narrow it down to one specific thing you want to know? For example, if you want to identify ingredients by tasting better, that's something people can answer. But "why can't I taste the notes in wine" is probably not. – FuzzyChef Feb 08 '22 at 01:05
  • @FuzzyChef I suppose it's a bit more of a meta question in the sense that I would like to know how it can come about that a person can become good at cooking without being able to pick out individual flavours from a plate. I suppose it's like a guitarist who can't read music. Is this type of question not allowed? – e god Feb 08 '22 at 02:28
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    "*I can never pick up the 'notes' written on the bottle*" Most of the time those are publicity bullshit, or at the very least too diluted and weak to properly identify individually for most people anyway. – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 08 '22 at 12:14
  • It potentially is on-topic, but your question text above asks 4 or 5 different things. If that's your real question, please edit so you ask it clearly. – FuzzyChef Feb 08 '22 at 15:45
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    Constant tasting while making things ( making sure you do what is required to make it safe to taste) helps a bunch, you learn what effects everything you are adding is having. But this is one of those things where some people are just much better at it than others – eps Feb 08 '22 at 22:27
  • @FuzzyChef edited for clarity – e god Feb 09 '22 at 13:34
  • I think there’s a question on here about how to train yourself to taste things better, but my attempts to locate it aren’t working as I can’t remember how it was worded – Joe Feb 09 '22 at 14:06

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Being able to identify flavours is, as you have described, a separate skill to being able to produce tasty food. Someone could have both skills, they could have the former without the latter (for example an expert taster employed by a food science factory), the latter without the former (like you), or neither.

Rough analogies could be in music, art or writing: most good musicians can produce beautiful music but only a few have perfect pitch, the ability to name a note from hearing it. Relative pitch (being able to identify the intervals between notes) is much more common but is still not necessary to produce music. An artist could produce a beautiful painting or sculpture without having the skill of identifying a type of paint or construction material by sight. A writer could be write excellent prose but wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you about parts of speech, or what feature of a particular sentence made it so good. These aren't exact analogies but hopefully they convey the broader point.

dbmag9
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