— Kristi Fleischmann

You know, one thing we used to teach a lot is that the tongue is actually the fastest healing organ in the body. It actually takes seven days to be able to retrain your palate, um, just by switching the way you're eating. A great example of this that I'd always give was, uh, salt. So if you, uh, say go to, uh, a favorite, you know, uh, restaurant, and you get your french fries or whatever beforehand, and you go in and you eat your french fries and you're just totally normal, and you're like, wow, these are delicious. Then you decide for an entire week, for seven days, I'm not gonna have any salt at all. Um, your tongue will actually completely transform during those seven days to adapt to a lower sodium tolerance. So if you go to the exact same restaurant seven days later, we'll say eight days later, and you go there and you order the same plate of french fries, you'll find that they're unbelievably salty compared to the week before when you tried it. So training your palate is something you can do just by adapting the different flavors and the different foods that you're eating. So, um, salt is one of those big ones because, uh, you know, as, as a chef was focused on healthy eating, um, it was something that a salt reduction was something we wanted to do. And I personally don't really add a lot of salt to my food. I'll usually do it to pasta water, including pasta, but otherwise, I'm not putting a lot of salt in my food. And I always say there's a salt salt shaker in every table in America. People want to add salt to their food, they can do it themselves, but to start with kind of a baseline with a very low sodium is a great way to do that. Now as far as going beyond that training your palate, it's great to be able to try different things and try them three things. In fact, I do this with my kids all the time. They might, um, try something and they're like, oh, I don't like that. And it's like, okay, well, you will in three more tries, right? Because, um, it takes a while for your, for your tongue to adapt to those to be able to get those, um, sensations and the flavors from those. So, um, your, your palette will eventually adapt the more you're trying into that. And Char, I know you posted a link here. Do you wanna talk about that one a little bit? You know, it was a quick, easy article, but I think your practical tips really are the concrete foundation to that question. And I will say that everything that Dan said is absolutely true because after having been plant-based for my first 30 days, and then I went out to a regular restaurant ordering plant-based food, and I had to send it back to the kitchen because it was so salty to me, but probably mm-hmm. Not having salt for 30 days did that. So, um, yeah. Yes, it's amazing. Change moves mountains. Yeah, It really does.

https://www.flavorsandfrontiers.com/post/the-art-of-tasting-how-chefs-train-their-palate