A question for chemists, physiologists, and chefs.
For Easter dinner my gf made a leg of lamb. Poor little three legged lamb stumbling about aside, it got me to thinking. Lamb tastes very distinctive. Beef tastes like beef. The same can be said of pork, chicken, deer, and horse. Although people say that frog legs “taste like chicken” to me there is a difference.
Anyone able to explain what it is that gives each species a distinctive taste? Muscle physiology is pretty similar between species, with differences like slow and fast twitch fibers occurring in each individual. So what’s the straight dope? And why hasn’t this question been asked before (or am I lousy searcher?)?
Do the makers of products like Boca Burgers make their product taste beef-like by mimicry of chemistry?
This is one of those obnoxious googled GQ answers, but it might give us somewhere to start. I’ve heard (and googled a cite) that the muscle fibers themselves all have pretty much the same taste, and that it’s the fat that tastes different. Well why does the fat taste different, you may now ask? I don’t know. But it may mean that muscle isn’t the answer and we needn’t look in that direction.
My son mentioned fat as a contributing factor to taste (it was a strange meal). I argued that even the fat has a distinctive taste. Lamb fat to me tastes awfully different than chicken or beef fat.
I’ve noticed that lamb has been getting beefier-tasting of late. Less than a year ago, I ordered a lamb shish-kabob in a restaurant, and then sent the apparently beef kabobs back to the kitchen, complaining that they’d screwed up my order! I don’t think I’m the only one, either, as the New York Times Dining section has run an article on the phenomenon at some point within the last year or so; I think they speculated that it had to do with both beef and lamb being increasingly grain-fed, and they pointed out that grass-fed lamb tastes much lamb-ier. So perhaps different feeding preferences make a difference between species?
They taste different because their body chemisty is different. Blood from a cow is not the same as blood from a chicken. Yeah, they both have blood, but not the same blood. Yeah, they both have muscle, but not the same muscle. A cow is not a chicken. Everything about it is different, including the taste. I’d be shocked if they didn’t taste different. The differences may be subtle from one way of looking at it, but you can’t transfuse a chicken with cow’s blood so the differences are significant from another way of looking at it. The biochemistry of taste is subtle enough to discern the subtle differences in the biochemistry of cows and chickens. If it wasn’t, they would taste the same.
To add another point, some beef tastes different than others. We get a cow from the inlaws, and it tastes different than beef from the grocery store.
The flavor of meat can be different from at least these variables
Age
Feed
Type of animal
Breed of animal
Perhaps even amount of muscle tone. I know that tone affects toughness, wouldn’t be surprised if it affects taste as well.
As another oddity, milk tastes different from different producers. Granted, there would be variations between individual cows, but you’d think after combining the milk many cows together, and pasturizing that there would be some baseline for taste, but I can tell the difference.
I think it ought to be clear to most people that the different tastes arise from exposure of the taste buds to different chemicals; isn’t the question about how the physiology of similar organs in different species differ such that they give rise to different tastes? At least that’s how I read it.
That said, I have no clear idea about the answer. Given that there are a fabulous array of processes going on in any given cell, not to mention the post-mortem chemical transformations, plus the sensitivity of the taste senses (our prevalent taste may arise from a compound at the ppb level), it’s not likely to be a one line answer.
Obviously they differ at the genetic level and in the ways those differences express themselves in the subtle differences of the biochemistry of species.
Some pollutants, for example, concentrate in fat, some in muscle, and some are found primarily in the blood, so I suspect all those places are probably responsible for differing tastes between species and between individuals. My biochemistry isn’t exactly the same as yours and it is both genetics and environment that is responsible for those differences. You and I wouldn’t taste the same and I don’t think you can say much more about it than it is the small differences in our chemistry that does it.
I’ve run across plenty of anecdotal evidence that the diet of a lactating female can have a dramatic effect on the flavor of milk, e.g., onions making cow’s milk taste bad, human mothers noticing a reluctance of their baby to nurse if they’ve eaten certain foods, etc. I’d say urine smelling funny after eating asparagus is further evidence that diet puts chemicals into the bloodstream that could affect flavor. Fat seems a likely place for such compounds to accumulate.
Cooks preparing “wild” meats (e.g., deer or bear), but who don’t want them to taste too wild have always used lard, or better yet, strips or “laces” of unrendered pork fat which they thread through the meat (ensures that the pork fat flavor permeates the meat). This gives the meat a sort of combination flavor - a little bit wild, a little bit domesticated.
Diet is what provides the building blocks of body tissue. It is therefore logical that the chemical makeup of the diet will affect the chemical makeup of the tissues built from it. This explains the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef or lamb/mutton. It also explains why milk-fed veal (i.e., kosher) tastes so much better (just quoting; I don’t eat veal, never have - AAMOF, eat lotsa fish & dairy, and very little meat, period) than commercially produced veal, where the calves are fed a ghastly commercial concoction that is nutritionally deficient in some important ways.
For those who eat bear, I’m sure it makes an enormous difference in what season the bear is killed, given that bears are not merely omnivorous, but have diets that vary widely depending on what’s available. I’d suspect that meat from a bear living near a salmon river would taste rather fishy toward the end of the salmon run, but if the bear were killed at the end of the season for raspberries or blackberries, the meat might have a very delicate flavor. OTOH, I don’t think that bear is legitimate game in either of those seasons (but ICBW). A bear that ate from garbage cans probably wouldn’t taste very good. :dubious:
The chickens we had when I was growing up were like Amish chickens today. They ate cracked corn, in addition to whatever else they found tasty in their yard. That, of course, was mostly bugs and worms. Studying anthro, I learned that insects are high in both protein and fat; that’s why some subsistence cultures have eaten them. Worms, I suppose, are mostly protein, making them less desirable, i.e., lower concentration of calories. One thing that’s absolutely certain is that “Amish” chicken has a more decided and appealing flavor (and a vastly more appetizing smell) than the other stuff, from those poor birds that live in cages. IOW, we benefit more from treating them well. Or at least that’s the lesson I draw.
