Mouthfeel facts for kids
Mouthfeel is how food and drinks feel in your mouth. It's not about the taste, like sweet or sour, but about the physical feelings. Think about how a crunchy apple feels different from a soft banana. These feelings, along with taste and smell, help us enjoy our food. Sometimes, people just call mouthfeel "texture."
What is Mouthfeel?
Mouthfeel is a super important part of how we experience food. It helps us decide if we like something or not. Experts use mouthfeel when they test and rate foods, like during wine-tasting. They check how a food feels from the very first bite, through chewing, and even after you swallow it.
For example, when tasting wine, people might say it has a "big" or "chewy" mouthfeel. This describes the overall feeling of the wine in your mouth. How food feels can also make you feel full. Foods that are thicker, like a milkshake, might make you feel full faster.
Mouthfeel is often linked to how much water is in a food. Hard or crispy foods, like crackers, have very little water. Soft foods, like bread, have more water.
What Mouthfeel Qualities Can We Feel?
There are many different ways food can feel in your mouth. Here are some common mouthfeel qualities:
- Chewiness: How much a food resists when you chew it. Think of a gummy bear.
- Cohesiveness: How much a food stretches or changes shape before it breaks when you bite it with your back teeth.
- Crunchiness: The sound and feeling of a food breaking when you chew it, like a potato chip.
- Density: How solid or compact a food feels after you bite all the way through it.
- Dryness: How much a food makes your mouth feel dry.
- Exquisiteness: How good or special a food feels in your mouth.
- Fracturability: How easily a food crumbles, cracks, or shatters. This includes things like crispiness or brittleness.
- Graininess: How much a food feels like it has small, gritty particles, like sand.
- Gumminess: How much effort it takes to break down a soft, chewy food until it's ready to swallow.
- Hardness: How much force you need to bite into or squish a food.
- Heaviness: How much a food feels like it weighs when you first put it on your tongue.
- Moisture absorption: How much a food soaks up the saliva in your mouth.
- Moisture release: How much wetness or juiciness comes out of a food when you chew it.
- Mouthcoating: The feeling of a film left in your mouth after you chew, like from fatty foods.
- Roughness: How scratchy or uneven a food's surface feels on your tongue.
- Slipperiness: How easily a food slides around on your tongue.
- Smoothness: When a food has no lumps, bumps, or particles; it feels completely even.
- Uniformity: How consistent a food feels all the way through.
- Uniformity of bite: How even the force feels as you bite through a food.
- Uniformity of chew: How consistent the chewing feeling is as you eat a food.
- Viscosity: How thick a liquid is, like how hard it is to slurp a thick milkshake.
- Wetness: How much moisture you feel on the surface of a food.
