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I'd like to say I'm good at cooking. I understand each element of the cooking process well, I can imagine flavours and how ingredients will alter the flavour of a dish. I believe I can put together really flavourful meals and (not trying to humble brag here) receive a lot of compliments for my cooking. However, I would say I'm pretty bad at identifying flavours. If someone presents me with a dish and asks me to identify the ingredients, I can get a few of them but in general I miss a bunch.

Why would it be the case that, being able to understand how ingredients change a flavour, I cannot identify the ingredients that produced the flavour? That is to say, how can it come about that someone can be a competent cook yet not pick out flavours from a plate? And how can I improve this skill?

e god
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Being able to identify flavours is, as you have described, a separate skill to being able to produce tasty food. Someone could have both skills, they could have the former without the latter (for example an expert taster employed by a food science factory), the latter without the former (like you), or neither.

Rough analogies could be in music, art or writing: most good musicians can produce beautiful music but only a few have perfect pitch, the ability to name a note from hearing it. Relative pitch (being able to identify the intervals between notes) is much more common but is still not necessary to produce music. An artist could produce a beautiful painting or sculpture without having the skill of identifying a type of paint or construction material by sight. A writer could be write excellent prose but wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you about parts of speech, or what feature of a particular sentence made it so good. These aren't exact analogies but hopefully they convey the broader point.

dbmag9
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