Professor Heather Smyth

speaker

68 appearances 4 recordings 3 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Professor Heather Smyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.

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The Food Chain · Why do we love smoky flavours so much? · 17 Jun 2026 podcast

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.

Absolutely.

That's right.

So maillard reaction is like a caramelisation reaction.

It's a little bit different chemically, but the maillard reaction is when something's burning or cooking, definitely that browned flavour and then also the burned compounds that come from the wood itself.

So we've got these gorgeous aroma volatiles that our nose is sensing, and we're either smelling those through our nose or up the back of our throat.

And at the same time, we've got taste compounds, which are on our tongue.

So there's some bitterness associated with smoke flavour, sometimes even sweetness, depending on the type of wood that's used.

to create that smoked flavor in the first place.

There's even trigeminal sensations going on.

So trigeminal is a textural sensation in the mouth.

So you could have a cooling sensation from a smoked flavor or a warming sensation from a smoked flavor as well.

So very complex.

Absolutely.

So much going on.

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

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