I believe that tasting is the key to flavor development. Elsewhere I have described a categorizing technique we use at Craftmaster to taste materials and systematically collect information about them. With this information, which is free of the errors and biases of reports in the scientific literature, flavor chemists can create flavors without relying on existing formulas.
The Equation
At Craftmaster we make flavors with the help of the following equation:
Butter Flavor From a Flavor Character Item
Let’s make a flavor. We’ll assume that I have a customer who desires a margarine flavor. We’ll assume that I have tasted a wide variety of materials that I have classified as flavor character items, flavor contributory items and flavor differential items (as described in the previous article in this series ). I collect all my notes from various tasting sessions. I also collect data from my cards, my books and my mind. I decide from all this what I want to try. I try each material at the level my notes suggest and put it in the customer’s base. In my notes I find that diacetyl at 3 ppm is a flavor character item (a material whose taste resembles the taste of some other substance) for butter. This was determined in water. Since I don’t know what it tastes like in the customer’s base, I put it in at 3 ppm, the level suggested by my notes. Now let’s go to the equation, I make 100 cc of a 1% solution of diacetyl, so:
