“Why does BBQed food taste so goddamn good?” That’s the question I asked myself yesterday as I sat in my old Nissan with my head down snarfing a beautiful BBQ pork sandwich from Lombardi’s in Petaluma.
So I dug in to find out.
Making good food is a form of chemistry, yes, but it also has a lot to do with biology. So in order to understand why a freshly barbequed pork sandwich, slathered in sweet sweet BBQ sauce tastes so goddamn finger licking amazing, we need to start with the biology of your big, fat mouth.
As you probably know, your mouth comes equipped with more than 10,000 taste buds – essentially nerve cells that are activated by the chemical makeup of food. Your buds send messages to your brain about the balance between sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (which means “yummy” in Japanese) and that’s partly how you perceive the food. But there are a lot more flavors outside of those core five, and in order to perceive those you need something far more powerful than taste buds. Specifically your sense of smell, which is 17,000 times stronger than taste buds. In fact, olfaction accounts for the majority of what you perceive as flavor, and is furthermore responsible for the most interesting flavors in foods like meaty, floral, fruity, herbal, citrus, burnt, etc. The nose knows, as the saying goes.
That’s part of the reason that BBQ always tastes so goddamn good. The smell starts well before you chomp down on the food. I stood on the porch outside of Lombardi’s on the northern outskirts of Petaluma waiting for my sandwich while seven BBQ grills pumped out the smokey aroma of delicious meats being flame-cooked to perfection. In fact, I was basically choking on the smoke - and I wasn’t the only one. In that (impossibly long long) moment, the aromas were sending ALL CAPS telegrams to my brain, waking up my taste buds and preparing them for the parade of deliciousness that I was about to experience.
In fact, some say that it’s the smoke itself that makes BBQ foods taste so goddamn delicious. Our sense of smell is lodged in an ancient part of the brain called the limbic system, which houses emotion and long-term memory. That's why smell triggers memories so easily. But the reason smoke, especially the smoke from cooking meat is so powerful is because it's encoded in our DNA. We've been doing that for 1.8 million years. “I don’t know if we come into the world loving these smells or if we come into the world prepared to love it because of evolution,” says Paul Breslin, a professor of nutritional science at Rutgers University. “But the connection is profound.”
Another reason BBQ’ed food tastes so goddamn good is the chemistry part. Specifically. the Maillard reaction. If you Google “BBQ science,” you’ll find this term mentioned over and over. It means that browning food at a high exterior temperature (above 285F) creates a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a simple sugar, which in turn creates a bounty of flavor molecules. Each food generates different kinds of flavor molecules, resulting in uniquely delicious flavors.
What’s all of this BBQ talk have to do with delicatessens?
Considering the focus on BBQ, one might be forgiven for thinking that Lombardi’s Gourmet Deli and Smokhouse may have stretched the traditional notion of a delicatessen jussst a little. However, they do offer sandwich specials that are NOT made from BBQd meatsies, a resplendant array of pre-packaged salads (they call them “gourmet salads”), cheeses, pastas, a selection of some 250-300 wines, and an entire refrigerator dedicated to baked beans. Is this enough to be able to justify the word delicatessen? Shit, I don’t know. I’m not the delicatessen police. But if I were the delicatessen police, I would turn a blind eye and keep my mouth shut – well, except to take ill-advisedly huge bites of the amazing freakin’ sandwiches.
The food
As I said, mine was a BBQ pork sandwich called the “Pig Out.” It featured BBQ Pork bathed in BBQ sauce and served on a soft roll with pepper jack, mayo, tomato and red onion. It wasn’t exactly a well-balanced sandwich (the BBQ flavors heavily dominated), but the onion and tomato did serve as nice accent tastes. I didn’t taste (or smell) the cheese and didn’t really care. Especially at about bite number three whereapon my eyes rolled into the back of my head and I entered another state of consciousness. Nirvana perhaps.
Luka (son, 14) had a “Killer Joes,” which was thoroughly stuffed with fully lathered BBQ tri-tip and melted horseradish cheddar on a soft roll with mayo, horseradish, tomato, and onions. You may have noticed the word horseradish mentioned twice there, and some bites bit back a little too hard for either of our liking (I ate half). But overall, it was nearly as good as the Pig Out. Both sandwiches were under $11, which felt like a steal. Then again, my endorphins were pretty jacked.
Lombardi’s is family owned since 1999 and they do focus pretty heavily on buying local. They have a cork board with letters from local 4H kids thanking them for buying their lamb or pig or cow or whatnot. It’s a high volume operation that was doing maybe 200 to 300 sandwiches in the lunch hour and had around 20 employees working there. It had a nice working folk vibe and lots of people with logo shirts, hardhats, and coveralls stopping in on their lunch hour.
Side note: their Twitter page has been suspended for violating Twitter guidelines. Not sure I’d keep that connected to the website. Just sayin’.
Possibly a lesson in there for other delicatessens
Smell isn’t just a hellova lot more powerful than taste, it drives the enjoyment of your food. If you’re a deli owner, what are you doing to activate your customer’s olfactory factory? Are you baking? BBQing? Smoking? Frying? What’s in the air over at your place? Something to think about.