strawberry

The strawberry banana smoothie is the one recipe here that uses Fragaria × ananassa: 150 grams go in frozen, about a cup, with a frozen banana, 240 ml of milk and 12 grams of chia. The recipe calls the pair sweet, cold and naturally pink, and adds a little raw sugar only if the fruit needs it. Three compounds are traced to the strawberry. Furaneol, the caramel-sweet furanone at the heart of ripe strawberry aroma, lets the blend read as candy-sweet with barely any added sugar. Citric acid, the dominant organic acid, is the clean tartness that keeps the sugar from cloying. Fructose is the sweetest of the sugars the two fruits bring.

The Journal's note on retronasal olfaction opens with an experiment. Pinch your nose shut and bite a strawberry, and sweet, a little sour, wet, cold and some seeds survive; the strawberry is gone. Let go of your nose and the whole fruit floods back in a single beat. Nothing changed in your mouth: the receptors sit in tissue high in the nasal cavity, and the volatile molecules reach them from inside the mouth, up and back behind the soft palate. The note counts hardware to explain it. The human genome carries 339 intact olfactory receptor genes against about 28 taste receptors on the tongue, the real reason, it says, that a strawberry has a name and sweetness does not.