Salt

[badthings]

As I understand it, umami works at a higher level by causing multiple channels to interact.

Uh-oh, I'm not going to get anything done until I read all these things...

One more: According to this article from the Feb. 7 Cell, "despite relying on different receptors, sweet, amino acid, and bitter transduction converge on common signaling molecules" (amino acid = umami) -- meaning that salty and sour are somehow different from the other three. I can't read the damn Cell article without a subscription, but here's a summary. Something I read at the time suggessted that sweet/bitter were the most evolutionarily important tastes, because sweet = calories and bitter = poison, but I'm not sure where this was...

... or what it has to do with salt...

EDIT: That didn't take so long! Might Salt (and sour) have a different and potentially more overarching effect than the other tastes because it is ion-channel mediated, not G-protein mediated? I don't know, but it seems like ion channels would move a lot more material than G-proteins.

Edited September 11, 2003 by badthings (log)

[Human Bean]

Great to see the (possibly Smug) Scientific (optionally, Bastards) having a go at this.

Wish I could add something on the scientific front, but I'm a computer geek, not a bio-geek.

But, I did find something amusing in the salt link posted above, written by a BBQ-er. There's a section, "Why Kosher salts works better in brines" that utterly fails to answer the question.

The structure of mineral salt is as a cubic crystal.  A single grain of Kosher salt is composed of many cubes, stuck together into a big grain.  As a result, a single grain of Kosher salt can absorb much more liquid than a grain of granulated salt.

Emphasis theirs, not mine.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. Salt doesn't absorb water, it dissolves in it; quite the opposite of what the writer said. A minor point perhaps, but I found it charmingly uninformed.

[rxrfrx]

badthings, that Cell article looks pretty fascinating. I have full-text access to the journal, so I'm gonna bookmark the paper now and read through it at my next convenience... I'll try to put any important points in a new post on this thread.