Analysis of Taste Adjectives of Traditional Cooked Rice, Noodles, Porridge and Rice Cakes by Sensory Evaluation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to find out the taste adjectives of Korean cooked rice, noodles, porridges and rice cakes as well as to analyze the relation between the taste adjectives of foods. We gathered and chose 36 related Korean adjectives for expressing not only the taste but also the smell of foods. Subsequently, we performed a sensory evaluation for 18 Korean foods with 20 trained panelists in order to check the proper adjectives when they tasted the foods. The often selected taste adjectives were ‘sweet’, ‘tasty’, ‘sticky’ and ‘soft’ among 36 taste adjectives. The PCA was performed to summarize the taste adjectives for each of the 18 foods. The principal components explained 50.94 % of the total variance. The adjectives ‘spicy’ and ‘refresh’ were closely related to one another in the positive direction of PC1. In contrast, ‘weak’, ‘hard’ and ‘sticky’ were closely related to one another in the negative direction of PC1. PC2 was marked by ‘hard’ and ‘spicy’, which were located in the positive direction. In contrast, ‘weak’ and ‘soft’ were located in the negative direction. PC3 was marked by ‘nutness’, ‘bitter’ and ‘spicy’, which are associated with bibimbab, conveying a high degree of correlation among them in a positive direction. In contrast, ‘cool’, ‘sour’ and ‘refresh’ were located in the negative direction.