Hamilton & District Chefs Assoc Meeting

Tonight we attended the Hamilton & District Chefs Assoc monthly meeting at Avondale Restaurant Equipment.
The guest speaker tonight was Norm Myshok from Canada Bread. It was a very interesting demonstration.

The main focus of tonights meeting was about taste. He had brought little containers of different items for us to stick on our tongue to show us how we re-act to these different items. The first one we dried our tongue and then put some sugar on the dry spot, when your tongue is dry you don't really taste the sweetness but as soon as it becomes moist again you suddenly have this burst of sweetness. We also had little jelly beans, we plugged our noses and chewed on them with no flavour, as soon as we unplugged our noses we had a burst of the flavour of the bean.

He also talked in detail about umami, it is a bit involved to go into here but basically its one of the 5 different flavours. The 5 different flavours are sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami. Umami is a Japanese word meaning "pleasant savory taste". For more information about this there is an interesting read on Wikipedia, just type in umami.

Tim put out a nice little snack of cheeses, fresh fruits and crackers. The Chefs Association is a great place to meet people in the field and learn a lot of new things. We look forward to the next meeting, which now due to summer coming will not be until September. The meetings are once a month and there is a page on facebook if you want more information "Hamilton District Society of Chefs & Cooks"