BARB STUCKEY: Would you mind taping your nose?

DAVID POGUE: Excuse me?

BARB STUCKEY: Just close it, like this. I'll do it with you. You're just going to take one of your nostrils and kind of plug it, and then…

DAVID POGUE: Okay.

BARB STUCKEY: …plug the other one, and…

DAVID POGUE: Oh, my gosh.

Barb Stuckey is a professional taster for a food product company called Mattson, near San Francisco.

Okay.

BARB STUCKEY: So, now, go ahead and swish it around your mouth.

DAVID POGUE: Okay: water.

BARB STUCKEY: Take another swish, and this time, when you are swishing, let's take the tape off.

DAVID POGUE: Okay. Oh, my gosh, it turned into brown butter.

BARB STUCKEY: Most of flavor comes through your nose.

DAVID POGUE: …freaking me out! Wait a minute, but it was inside my mouth. I couldn't have smelled it.

Oh yes, I could. Inside our mouths there is a back channel to our smell receptors. Volatile molecules, or vapors, rise off food in our mouths and trigger our sense of smell.

But if your nose is blocked, the vapors aren't pulled up into the nasal cavity and you don't smell them. It turns out our nose plays a big role in the creation of flavor, the total experience of food.

BARB STUCKEY: It feels like the flavor is coming from your mouth, but, in fact, it's coming from your mouth through your nose, and the aromas are detected in your nose.

DAVID POGUE: And smell isn't our only sense at work.

Barb asks me to try a new juice they've just created.

It's definitely not fresh-squeezed.

BARB STUCKEY: What would you say if I told you that was apple juice?

DAVID POGUE: Wait a minute. You are doing some kind of brain meld on me. This is clearly orange juice, but it tastes like apple juice, so what have you done here?

BARB STUCKEY: All we have done is taken apple juice and added a little bit of orange color.

DAVID POGUE: You're kidding.

BARB STUCKEY: So it looks like orange juice.

DAVID POGUE: Gosh, I am such a sucker! I can't believe I fell for that. It is perfectly good apple juice.

BARB STUCKEY: It is very good apple juice, yeah.

DAVID POGUE: Barb says not only smell and vision, but even sound can influence taste. So I'm blindfolded to see if cold water sounds different from hot water.

Wait a minute. I could tell that the second one was hot! How could I tell that the second one was hot?

BARB STUCKEY: All right, take your blindfold off. The second one was hot.

DAVID POGUE: I know. I could hear that it was hot, but that makes no sense! It had a hot water sound.

Believe it or not, hot water has a different pitch when it hits the cup than cold water does.

BARB STUCKEY: Everyone gets it right.

Sound gives us information about, not just temperature, but freshness, crispiness, crunchiness, texture, fat content.

DAVID POGUE: You don't actually put thought into the sound these foods are going to make do you?

BARB STUCKEY: Of course, very much so.

DAVID POGUE: Here at Mattson, they're trying to make treats so delicious that you will crave them and buy them.

And, Honey, there's no fat! There's no sugar!

To do so, they use their understanding of how flavor works and food science to engineer flavors that appeal to all your senses.

BARB STUCKEY: Flavor, that concept, comes through many different senses. Really, when you're experiencing food, and you say you like the taste of something, you really like the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds, the way it smells and the way it tastes.