Cabin, do you like sour candy?

He says, eh, you have to have two because I put two in my mouth.

Sure.

Yay!

What is it?

Toxic waste sour candy.

You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

So we're grabbing...

Bonapetit shortwave, co-host Aaron Scott here.

White wine vinegar from a pantry.

Together with science writer Katie Wu, we are getting culinary shortwave style.

I've got this lovely Amazon package full of very sour candy.

We're kicking off a new series. We're calling taste buddies.

We're often taught that there are five basic tastes, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

So in the coming weeks, we're going to delve into the science behind some of those.

Plus some other tastes that don't normally make the cut.

I mean, taste is both super simple and super complicated.

It is one of our five sort of classic senses.

And when we taste things, we are basically perceiving the chemicals in our food.

Those are picked up by little cells in our mouths and they signal to our brain and our brain says,

hey, I just tasted something.

Katie's a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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