Flavor

Flavor or flavour (see spelling differences) is the sensory impression of food or other substance, and is determined primarily by the chemical senses of taste and smell. The "trigeminal senses", which detect chemical irritants in the mouth and throat as well as temperature and texture, are also important to the overall Gestalt of flavor perception. The flavor of the food, as such, can be altered with natural or artificial flavorants which affect these senses.

A flavorant is defined as a substance that gives another substance flavor, altering the characteristics of the solute, causing it to become sweet, sour, tangy, etc.

Of the three chemical senses, smell is the main determinant of a food item's flavor. While there are only five universally recognized basic tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory) – the number of food smells is unbounded. A food's flavor, therefore, can be easily altered by changing its smell while keeping its taste similar. This is exemplified in artificially flavored jellies, soft drinks, and candies, which, while made of bases with a similar taste, have dramatically different flavors due to the use of different scents or fragrances. The flavorings of commercially produced food products are typically created by flavorists.

Flavor (disambiguation)

Flavour or Flavor (US English) is the sensory impression of a food or other substance that is determined mainly by the chemical senses of taste and smell.

It may also refer to:

Science

Film and TV

Music

Artists and bands

Albums

Songs

Flavour (particle physics)

In particle physics, flavour or flavor refers to a species of an elementary particle. The Standard Model counts six flavours of quarks and six flavours of leptons. They are conventionally parameterized with flavour quantum numbers that are assigned to all subatomic particles, including composite ones. For hadrons, these quantum numbers depend on the numbers of constituent quarks of each particular flavour.

Intuitive description

Elementary particles are not eternal and indestructible. Unlike in classical mechanics, where forces only change a particle's momentum, the weak force can alter the essence of a particle, even an elementary particle. This means that it can convert one quark to another quark with different mass and electric charge, and the same for leptons. From the point of view of quantum mechanics, changing the flavour of a particle by the weak force is no different in principle from changing its spin by electromagnetic interaction, and should be described with quantum numbers as well. In particular, flavour states may undergo quantum superposition.