Professor Heather Smyth

There's aroma, there's taste, there's texture.

We're feeling all of it at once.

I think it's two main things.

One of those is that in all cultures, in all people groups across the world, smoke has been used traditionally to preserve foods and it means that foods are safe to eat.

And that means that people around the world are quite familiar with smoked flavours and human beings like foods and like flavours that they're familiar with.

Absolutely.

A comforting and well-known and familiar flavor.

You know, smell is very associated with emotion in our minds.

Smell and emotion are looked after by our limbic system in our brain.

So anything that smells familiar is very emotionally comforting for us.

The other part that I think attracts people to smoke flavours is the fact that it's complex.

And in all food systems, when food is complex, and certainly if you have a mature taste for food, we always would prefer a much more complex flavoured wine.

more complex flavoured sauce, that level of complexity that we get from smoke flavour.

And that's because it's got many, many different aroma volatile compounds that are causing the aroma of smoke, but also in combination with taste components that are present.

It's that complexity altogether that I think also attracts us to smoke flavour.

So a lot of things are going on.

All of our senses are being triggered there.

Smoke is made up of aroma volatile compounds, which through our nose and our sense of olfaction trigger

which is separate to our sense of taste.

There are hundreds of different aroma volatiles that are created in that pyrolysis reaction when wood is burned and also Maillard reactions, which are famous flavour reactions that you even see in coffee beans when we roast beans and whatnot.