Seasoned Advice Asked by user93337 on April 18, 2021
Can one create any flavor combination by breaking down the five modalities of taste into their chemical form and adjusting proportions accordingly?
Namely, if you broke down sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami into their rawest chemical form, could you combine these chemical to create virtually any taste?
While your wording is somewhat ambiguous, the answer is a resounding "no" for both possible senses of the word taste. To avoid confusion, I will use the word taste for only the sensation of sweet/salty/sour/bitter/umami, as in "tastes slightly salty", and the word flavor for what we perceive when we eat a given food, as in "tastes of strawberries".
Starting with the sense I think you meant: flavor.
This is a highly complex sense involving many different types of receptors.
And if you want a perfect match, you also would need to include
Of course, you don't have to create an exact match to invoke an association of a given flavor, this is how foods with artificial flavoring "work". They tend to contain 3-4 of the most prominent smell molecules of the given food (a single one in the cheapest case), roughly match the flavor direction of the original (I have never seen somebody put strawberry flavoring in pringles-style chips - but note that you don't want a perfect match, nobody would want a candy that has the sweetness levels of a real strawberry) and the rest - and it is a big rest - is labeling, to give you the knowledge mentioned above.
So, to the second sense of the word: taste in the strict sense.
This is also impossible, simply because there is no "rawest chemical form" of any of the five tastes. See this older question for more background. Each of the taste receptors can be triggered by different molecules, and produces a different taste profile - the bitterness of quinine tastes very different from the bitterness of bitrex, for example. You cannot even use one kind of bitter to imitate another kind of bitter - so you certainly cannot match any possible combination of the five. The best you can do is to do is a very rough imitation, which will lack all nuances.
Correct answer by rumtscho on April 18, 2021
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