So You Think You Have Taste? – A Blind Tasting

Word on the street is that vision plays a large role in how we all perceive food. Since I first heard about Zee’s blind-tasting challenge, I have been curious to try it out. Initially I could not imagine having much trouble figuring out what I am tasting just because my sense of sight was taken away by a blindfold. However, I reasoned that for blind tasting to be so popular there must be some difficulty involved in it.

After seeing Viviane’s post about doing the tasting with her sister and nephews, I thought this would be something fun to do with the kids. Of course when I asked them they got all wide-eyed with excitement. I’m not sure if they had visions of cookies, ice cream, or brownies when I asked them if they wanted to participate, but I knew they would have fun in the end. So we scrounged up a sleeping mask to use as a blindfold and set off to start the test!

I set up the tasting with the same five items for each of my kids and had one stay in another room while the other tasted (to avoid them hearing each other’s comments and guesses). In turn, both of them teamed up to put together five items for me to taste. Our results are below:

Ingredient	Bianca’s Guess	Tyler’s Guess
Mango (diced)	Mango	Mango
Semi-sweet Chocolate  (chopped chips)	Dark chocolate	Chocolate Chips
Kiwi (diced)	Strawberry	Nectarine
Brazil Nuts (chopped)	Peanuts	Almonds
Apricot Jam	Strawberry Jam	Honey

Ingredient	Clint’s Guess
Cinnamon (powdered)	Cinnamon
Pine nuts (crushed)	Pine Nuts
Banana (mashed)	Banana
Mustard (deli-style)	Mustard
Pumpkin Seeds (chopped)	Pumpkin Seeds

We all had a lot of fun doing this! Although I did at least as well as I had hoped, it WAS a bit more difficult to guess the items without sight. The cinnamon surprised me a bit since it had a sweetness to it. I never thought of pure cinnamon as being sweet since it is so often mixed with other sweet and sugary items. Also, the mustard made me pause and think for about 20 seconds as I couldn’t quite place the flavor immediately. I picked up on the vinegar in the mustard and began racking my brain with various sauces and dressings before settling on my answer. Another thing I found amusing is that Bianca hates apricot jam, but loves strawberry jam… yet she guessed that the apricot jam was strawberry jam. With this in mind, I wonder if I can convince the kids that the vegetables they dislike taste like some other things they enjoy? Maybe I can just blindfold them at dinner time from now on ;o)