The Return of Zing: How to Get Sour Back into Your Life.
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 977 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan Saladino explores the taste and temptations of sourness, from our evolution to the way we cook and eat. A story of puckering pickles, science, fermentation and edible ants.
It's only in recent times that we have understood how and why we experience the sensation of sourness. The leader in the field is EMILY LIMAN, Professor of Biological Sciences at University of Southern California in the USA. She explains the recent discoveries about what happens when we put something sour in our mouths.
Forager Miles Irving takes Dan on a wild walk through a field in Kent in search of sources of sourness from insects to red berries.
Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop whose new book Sichuan Cookery, focuses on the food of southern provinces explains the role of pickles and vinegars.
In the studio Mark Diacano gives a guide to bringing more sour back into your life with lessons in piccalilli making and a beginners guide to kombucha.
Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.
Transcript
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| 0:37.0 | Come on, Ains, where are you? |
| 0:45.0 | They might have gone to ground down. |
| 0:48.0 | It's quite late in the year. |
| 0:49.0 | All we need is one. |
| 0:51.0 | We've got one. |
| 0:52.0 | Think of this program as the making of a meal, one that's based |
| 0:56.9 | around just one of our senses, our taste for sourness. And with the help of wild food expert Miles Irving I think we've just found our appetizer |
| 1:07.2 | which is trying to run away |
| 1:10.9 | So that is an orange carpets rent and like all ants it has sour flavor which comes from the |
| 1:18.4 | formic acid but they also have flavor chemicals and in this case this one well there's difference of opinion about it I |
| 1:25.3 | think they taste like coriander but they certainly have a sort of citrusy hint as well |
| 1:29.9 | maybe maybe kind of orangey but maybe we should see what you think. |
| 1:34.0 | I just pick one up. |
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