We already know that we have 5 basic tastes - sweet,salty,bitter, salty and umami. However, when we taste some foods those basic tastes couldn't explain what we really have in on our tongue - exact taste. Peoples tend to used another term to express their feeling, pleasantness about the food. Apart of spicy, savory is the most common term that we always used to describe 'mixture' taste. There's no specific definition on it. Can someone give some references or opinion on what is the exact definition of this 'savory'
Thanks, Peter. Agreed on what you have explained but we always get confused - how to define savory@savoury taste. The definition might be different from one individual to another. Some people tend to define it as meaty taste or other than sweet taste, mixture of spices etc.
Thanks for your long explanation,Peter. I do agree with you. Sensory evaluation is complex and complicated but i not really sure about savoury as a response. For me, savoury is still a taste; a combination of taste-flavor. As discussed by Chanderashekar et al., 2006, taste modalities encoded by single taste model or mixture taste model in the taste receptors. When taste present in mixtures form (more than 1 taste) each taste receptor will gather the mixtures (taste) before it translate by our brain. Those mixture of tastes will contribute to difference term such as savoury. However, it will continue to be differentiate by other factors such as language, culture and region. Malay for example, we didn't any exact term to be similar as savoury in english. Sedap is delicious. As far as i know, we (Malays) always interpret savoury as taste/flavor that evoke delicious response like sweet taste but other than sweet taste i.e spicy, meaty taste, etc.
In terms of taste research, savory has been occasionally used as an English language equivalent for umami. What you are describing appears to be a less specific term for a flavour (taste and aroma combined) associated with salty/umami base foods. You may expect that high quality descriptive analysis could further break down 'savory' to multiple component flavours.
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