Trick Your Taste Buds Into Enjoying More Healthy Foods

Sour Cream Chocolate Hokey Pokey Brownie

Food Diary (March 25, 2012)

Breakfast: Missed

Lunch: Rolled oats with banana, sunflower seeds and flax seeds

Dinner: Sandwich

Baking/sweets: Sour Cream Chocolate Hokey Pokey Brownie

Recently I received Arla Köket Smetana to test. I decided to use it to make brownies. The Smetana has a 42% fat content which is half of what butter has. Smetana worked well in a brownie. It added slight bitterness, a bit similar to dark chocolate.

The brownie was rich, not overly sweet and slightly bitter. During baking the hokey pokey melted and mingled with the brownie, creating a sticky gooey texture. Hokey pokey has a lot of air and this created gaps as they melted, giving it the 'rustic' look. But there were no gaps in the taste. The recipe is available here.

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Bite my Cake

Mint verrines

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: the Atlantic

Here are a few tips on “How to Trick Your Taste Buds Into Enjoying More Healthy Foods”.

Crunch

"We are drawn to texture and contrast, which is why we love crunchiness," said Barb Stuckey, who works for the food-development company Mattson. Stuckey cites a study in which subjects wore headphones while sampling Pringles potato chips. If the volume of the crunch was artificially cranked up, the tasters rated the chips as crisper and fresher.

Adding crunch to vegetables such as using toasted seeds can possible make the vegetable more appealing to eat, even potentially addictive.

Sweetness

Stuckey cites an Arizona State University study involving cauliflower and broccoli dipped briefly in sugar water. "Adding approximately 20 percent sugar not only resulted in higher pleasantness scores, but also changed the subjects' attitudes toward the vegetables in the future -- they liked unsweetened cauliflower and broccoli better from that point forward.

Trick Your Tongue

This is a small, red West African berry called Synsepalum dulcificum. For an hour after you eat one, sour foods will taste sweet. Scientists have discovered that a protein in the fruit binds to the sweet receptors in the tongue; the protein changes shape when exposed to acids, turning on those sweet receptors.