Meanings of basic taste in English

The basic taste qualities experienced by humans are sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.

However, not everyone is convinced that umami should even be classified as a basic taste.

And since there aren't many basic tastes, and we experience each of them often, that unique pairing can't occur.

Food developer Barb Stuckey asserts in her book Taste What You're Missing that there could be 25 different basic tastes.

Taste: it's complicated While taste cannot compete with smell in numbers, "five basic tastes" is a gross oversimplification.

The basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami are detected when chemicals that produce those tastes bind with certain receptors on our tongues.