Abstract
Mushrooms are a nutritious versatile ingredient in many food products. They are low in calories and have various potential medicinal properties as well. Surprisingly, little research on their descriptive sensory properties has been conducted. The objectives of this study were to a) establish a descriptive sensory flavor lexicon for the evaluation of fresh, dried, and powdered mushrooms and 2) use that lexicon to compare a selection of different mushrooms of various species and in fresh dried and powdered forms. A lexicon for describing mushroom was developed using a consensus profile method. A highly trained, descriptive sensory panel identified, defined, and referenced 27 flavor attributes for commercially available mushroom samples prepared as “meat” and broth. Attributes could be grouped in categories such as musty (dusty/papery, earthy/humus, earthy/damp, earthy/potato, fermented, leather (new), leather (old), mold/cheesy, moldy/damp, mushroomy), and other attributes such as fishy, shell fish, woody, nutty, brown, green, cardboard, burnt/ashy, potato, umami, protein (vegetable), yeasty, bitter, salty, sweet aromatics, sour, and astringent. Samples were then tested in three replications and mean values were compared statistically. In addition, principal component analysis was used to understand the characteristics of mushrooms evaluated. Dried mushrooms showed bitter, burnt, musty/dusty, astringent, old leather, and fresh mushroom characteristics and fresh mushroom showed umami, sweet, earthy/potato, earthy/damp, yeasty, and fermented. Mushrooms were grouped and differentiated in similar ways regardless of whether they were tested as broth or “meat”. Mushroom growers, product developers, chefs and other culinary professionals, sensory scientists, researchers, the food industry, and ultimately consumers will benefit from this lexicon describing a wide variety of mushroom flavor properties.
Highlights
Mushrooms are defined as “a macro-fungus with a distinctive fruity body which can be either epigeous or hypogenous and large enough to the seen with the naked eye and to be picked by hand” [1]
It must be noted that because we used a universal-type sensory scale where the range of scores went from none to extremely high, most of the scores for mushroom flavor are quite low because mushroom typically is a slight, delicate flavor
Some flavor notes appear to be unique to certain categories of mushrooms such as burnt/ashy, which appear at noticeable levels only in dried and powdered mushrooms
Summary
Mushrooms are defined as “a macro-fungus with a distinctive fruity body which can be either epigeous (above ground) or hypogenous (underground) and large enough to the seen with the naked eye and to be picked by hand” [1]. Perhaps that is because a lexicon for such sensory work is lacking Such lexicons have been published for many products over the years including meat [31,32], fish [33,34,35], vegetables [36,37,38,39,40], fruits [41,42,43,44,45], grains and breads [46,47,48], dairy products [49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56], beverages [57,58,59,60,61], other processed foods [62,63,64,65,66,67], and types of chemical compounds [68,69,70,71]. The objectives of this research were (1) to develop a lexicon of selected commonly available mushrooms used in food preparation including fresh, dried, and powdered forms, and (2) to develop a “map” of the flavor of those mushrooms
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