This is Most Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Have you ever wondered what rainforest ants taste like? Today we have flavor chemist Dr. Ariel Johnson to answer just that.

We also discuss how wildfire smoke can flavor wine and the science of taste and smell. Taste molecules like sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami are mostly water soluble.

And smell molecules, which is basically everything else, are more soluble in alcohol and oil.

So if you're trying to express like coffee beans, it'll be more bitter and acidic

if you make an extraction in water and then incorporate that. If you want to just have the

aromas of coffee, making a coffee butter or a coffee cream is a way to get that while

avoiding bitterness. Also coming up, we make a no-fuss Spanish almond cake, and later J. Kenji Lopez-Alte investigates

food expiration dates.

But first, we hear from barbecue expert Meathead Goldwyn about how to properly grill a steak.

Meathead, welcome back to Milk Street.

Oh, it's always good to talk to you, Christopher.

So how to cook a steak on a grill?

You and I've discussed this before, and you basically disagree with everything most people

think about how to cook a steak.

Well, I learned to grill from my dad, and my dad learned to grill from his dad, and his dad learned to grill from his dad, and that's the way most people learn to grill. And when you sit down and you think about it and you apply some current science principles to it, you figure out that a lot of that stuff is just wrong.

So let's start with a cut. Thin stakes,, thick steaks, which primal cut are we dealing with here?

Well, you went right to the heart of the question right now.

People always ask me how to cook a steak, hot and fast or low and slow.

And it all depends on how thick it is.

Now, this is, you know, whenever you cook, anything, indoors, outdoors, you're doing a physics experiment and you're doing a

chemistry experiment. This is physics. The steak is 70% water. It takes time for heat to move from the

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