Is salt salty?
Yes!
This distinguished gentleman and the Slime Mold Time Mold team ran three experiments on taste. Participants were self-selected, and mostly writers doing Inkhaven.
23 compatriots answered the call of science, blinded to all the compounds. Results are here.
Main Findings
Nutritional yeast tastes better if you’ve had it before!
There is a bimodal split as to whether people find baking soda salty!
Both sodium-only and chloride-only molecules taste somewhat salty by themselves.
Weirdly, finding MSG salty does not correlate with finding baking soda salty, even though they’ve both got sodium ions!
If you like nooch, you’re less likely to perceive straight sugar-water as salty??? This was the most statistically significant finding.
Let’s get yeasty
Anecdotally, it seems like many people don’t like nutritional yeast the first time they try it.
We put some nutritional yeast in an unlabeled bowl and we asked participants to shove it in their mouths.
We asked:
How much do you like this? (1-5)
Have you had this before? (Yes, No, Unsure)
Qualitative description
The distribution of liking nooch seems to be pretty flat.
This is astounding to me as someone who quite likes nooch.
But do people who have tried nooch before like it more? Yes
Using the Mann-Whitney U test, we’d only see results like that 9% of the time if the effect wasn’t real! I think we’re onto something.
The group that knew what it was described it with words like cheesy, fermented, umami
The group that didn’t know what it was described it as like chips, like peanuts, like parm without the goodness, like weetbix, and with un-fun texture and unpleasant.
Extreme results
Nooch Rating 1
Subtly crunchy, dry, aggressively pseudo cheesy note — Tried before — Vegetarian, Female (cis), 31
Like sawdust — Tried before — Omnivore, Male (cis), 21
Bitter and horrible — Unsure — Omnivore, Male (cis), 20
Nooch Rating 5
At first it was a slightly-positive-meh saltiness at the tip of my tongue and then it spread across my whole tongue and developed a much more complex and full bodied flavor that I liked weirdly a Lot — Never tried — Reducetarian, Nonbinary/other (AFAB), 30
It’s a salty, cheesy dust that lingers in the mouth and sticks to the back of the teeth — Tried before — Omnivore, Male (cis), 30
Crispy at the start, but suddenly dissolves into a sticky paste. A burst of flavor, like something salty, but not salty. Umami? MSG? — Tried before — Vegan, Female (trans), 25
Tasty, I feel this is quite dry — Tried before — Vegan, Male (cis), 36
Gimme that sweet, sweet protein
Glycine is an amino acid (a building block of protein).
We put it in a bowl, and asked participants to ingest the unlabeled white powder.
We asked:
Qualitative description
What do you think it is?
How much do you like it?
Respondents felt neutral-to-bad about glycine.
Almost everyone thought it was sugar, or an artificial sugar.
In researching glycine, I discovered that various glycine plants in China have become popular on Gen Z TikTok.
Extreme results
Glycine Rating 1
sand, in mouth tasteless at first then bitter. — Omnivore, Male (cis), 34
Glycine Rating 5
Very slightly sweet but not sugar probably some kind of artificial sweetener — Omnivore, Male (cis), 30
sweet — Vegetarian, Male (cis), 7
What’s salty, my guy?
Previously, the Slime Mold Time Mold team had some shenanigans with experiments around Potassium Chloride salt, a common salt replacement where you can get that salty tang without the sodium.
This raises the question: is the sodium ion not the salty part? Is it the chloride that’s actually salty?
We put it to the test, getting participants to rate the saltiness of various solutions. Various powders were added to different cups until they vaguely matched in taste level (doing equal mass doesn’t work because our receptors detect chemicals at different densities).
We had (in order):
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) - sodium, no chloride
Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) - sodium, no chloride
Potassium chloride - chloride, no sodium
Sugar - throw them off the scent
Water - another trick
Table salt (sodium chloride) - sodium AND chloride, that classic salt
Creatine - more misdirection
I had also prepared some sodium carbonate the night before. You can make it by heating baking soda in the oven for an hour at 200C until it has fully degassed. I was successful in this mission, then left it in a convenient location for someone to find and throw out. So it was not included.
Here are the results
Salt is salty!
Having JUST chloride (potassium chloride) or JUST sodium (baking soda/msg) seems to be equally mediumly salty.
Tasting these solutions greatly displeased many participants. There were very creative facial expressions. One participant had to spit their MSG into a bin.
It turns out all of them are awful when you don’t expect them.
🚨BIMODAL ALERT🚨
Everything seemed pretty normally distributed around the mean, EXCEPT BAKING SODA!
Some people find it very salty, other people find it not very salty! Weird!
The den of spurious correlations
⬇It seems like there’s a correlation with finding both potassium chloride and baking soda salty⬇
⬇Disliking Nooch might correlate with finding baking soda salty⬇
⬇Liking glycine might correlate with finding KCL salty⬇
⬇Also, weirdly, the most significant result was: If you like nooch, you find sugar LESS salty⬇
Why are nooch haters thinking that sugar is salty?? Something is wrong with those guys.
Null findings
Age and gender/sex descriptors didn’t seem to matter.
I would have thought that finding MSG salty would correlate with finding baking soda salty, but it does not!
Edit: What my girlfriend’s mom sent me 2 minutes after posting
