TOPEKA, KS—Amateur scientist Jennifer Thorpe, 35, recently made a breakthrough in her experiments when she discovered a relationship between the flavor of things and how much brown sugar she added.
The first was a happy accident, when she spilled some brown sugar on a piece of toast. After attempting to brush off the slice, she noticed that when she bit into the section of the toast upon which the brown sugar had fallen, her senses picked up a sweet flavor that tasted almost like sugar, but different in a pleasantly surprising way.
She almost ignored the incident, but then decided to try and reverse-engineer what had happened. It donned on her that perhaps the presence of unrefined sugar may have had something to do with the resulting brown-sugar-like flavor on her food, so she cautiously experimented with it on a new slice of toast.
The results were striking.
After a few more days of replicating her experiment, Thorpe delved into new territory, attempting to add brown sugar to other consumables. She noticed a clear correlation between how much brown sugar she added to foods, and how much those foods then tasted like brown sugar. Indeed, if she added a lot of brown sugar, the food's flavor was almost indistinguishable from brown sugar. If she added only a hint of brown sugar, however, the food tasted only a little more like brown sugar.
She emphasizes that she still needs more time to run further experiments, and the exact mechanism of the relationship between ingredients and flavor is not yet clear, but perhaps with more researchers examining the problem, and perhaps with more funding, this phenomenon will one day be understood.
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