So it's a comforting flavor.

Absolutely, a comforting and well-known and familiar flavor.

You know, smell is very associated with emotion in our minds.

Smell and emotion are looked after by our limbic system in our brain.

So anything that smells familiar is very emotionally comforting for us.

The other part that I think attracts people to smoked flavors is the fact that it's complex.

And in, in all food systems, when food is complex, and certainly if you have a mature taste for food, we always would prefer a much more complex flavored wine, a co- more complex flavored sauce.

That's when a food, um, gets a nice toasted brown color.

[sniffs] Oh, I love that smell.

Yes.

While our tongues are limited to five tastes, our noses can sniff out literally thousands of smells.

You can taste that a lemon is sour and an orange is sweet, but without the smell, you probably can't taste the difference between two sour things, like a lemon and lime, or two sweet things, like an orange and mandarin.

Uh, I got a sour bit.

Yes, we can detect combinations of these five basic tastes.

An orange can be sweet, sour, and bitter all at once, but the flavor of an orange comes from a mix of those tastes, plus its smell, and the texture or feel of it in our mouths.

Even the color of orange is part of its flavor.