Free tool · Taste science
Taste Check
Enter a recipe and see how salty, savory, sweet, sour and rich it should taste, predicted from its chemistry. Change an ingredient and watch the scores move.
Your recipe
Can't find something? Oils, butter without salt, pepper and dried spices barely change these five tastes. Add them as Oil or fat or Dried spices & herbs so the weight still counts.
Cooking (optional)
Cooking breaks down the compounds behind garlic and onion richness, releases savory compounds in mushrooms and some vegetables, and cooking down concentrates everything that stays in the pot.
How it should taste
1 = can't taste it · 10 = very strongHow to read the scores
Each score runs from 1, where you can't taste it at all, to 10, a very strong reference. The references are real solutions, so a score has a physical meaning:
| Taste | A 10 tastes like | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Saltiness | Seawater (about 3% salt) | Sodium, plus potassium chloride in salt substitutes |
| Umami | A 5% MSG solution | Glutamate, boosted many times over by nucleotides from meat, fish, mushrooms and tomatoes |
| Sweetness | 10% sugar in water, about a soda | Sugars, each weighted by how sweet it is. Acid takes the edge off. |
| Sourness | Straight lemon juice | Acids and pH. Sugar softens it. |
| Kokumi | The strongest richness boost measured | Glutathione and related compounds from garlic, onion, aged cheese and yeast extract. It has little taste on its own, but makes salt and umami taste fuller. |
What scores do people like? In my study of 754 rated tomato sauce recipes, ratings peaked at a saltiness near 8, and "too salty" complaints climbed above 9.5. Across 4,417 soups, saltier and more savory kept scoring better, and "bland" complaints outnumbered "too salty" 7 to 1.
Where it works best
- Best for watery foods eaten as served: Sauces, soups, stews, curries, salsas, broths and drinks.
- Rougher for: Baked goods and dry snacks, dressings and condiments you eat diluted, and chunky dishes where you taste pieces rather than the whole pot.
- Not covered: Bitterness, aroma, heat and texture. It predicts the five basic tastes only.
- It's a model, not a tasting panel. Use it to compare versions of a recipe and to understand why something tastes the way it does, then confirm with your own tongue. The predicted pH is an estimate too: Measure pH before relying on it for food safety.
Behind the model
Taste Check comes from my long-running taste research project, the Human Flavorome Project. It looks up the taste-active compounds in each ingredient (380 ingredients and counting), works out their concentration in the water of the dish, and converts them to intensity with published human taste data. It predicts pH with a charge-balance model and accounts for how acid dulls umami, how sugar softens sourness and how salt and kokumi boost umami.
Key sources
- Yamaguchi S. (1967, 1979). Umami synergy of glutamate and nucleotides; taste intensity scales and thresholds.
- Yamaguchi S. & Ninomiya K. (2000). Umami and food palatability. J Nutr 130:921S.
- Murphy C., Cardello A. & Brand J. (1981). Tastes of sodium and potassium salts. Physiol Behav.
- Moskowitz H. (1970). Ratio scales of sugar sweetness. Percept Psychophys 7:315.
- Schifferstein H. & Frijters J. (1990). Sensory integration in citric acid/sucrose mixtures. Chem Senses 15:87.
- Neta E. et al. (2007). The chemistry of sour taste. J Food Sci 72:S33.
- Miranda A. et al. (2021). Acids and umami perception. Food Qual Pref 89:104147.
- Price R. et al. (2020). Predicting the pH of foods. J Food Sci.
- Ohsu T. et al. (2010); Goto T. et al. (2016). Kokumi substances and the calcium-sensing receptor.
- Ingredient data: USDA FoodData Central, FDA Approximate pH of Foods and the published literature.