5 New flavour experiences to try in 2021

Do you consider yourself a serious foodie? For some people, eating and drinking are about much more than just nourishing the body; they’re also about seeking out new and interesting experiences. If you’re going to go through the effort of preparing food at home, it might as well be as delicious as you can make it. Enjoying new flavours at home also isn’t just about the food you prepare; it’s also about beverages and can even be about replacing the vices in your life with healthier alternatives. If you’re looking for something tasty and different, these are some of the new flavour experiences you must try in 2021.

Vaping

If you’ve never been a smoker, the idea of vaping as an introduction to new flavour experiences may never have occurred to you before. If that’s the case, you should be thankful that you’ve never allowed yourself to become addicted to nicotine. For the smokers of the world, though, vaping devices from companies like V2 Cigs UK have been truly life changing. Vaping, however, hasn’t just offered millions of smokers a tobacco-free alternative; it’s also offered the world’s smokers an entirely superior experience from a flavour standpoint. While the tobaccos of the world can certainly present a wide variety of different flavour profiles, they’ll all still taste like tobacco. Vaping makes it possible for you to inhale a vapour that tastes like a freshly baked doughnut topped with fruity cereal and blueberry icing – or just about anything else you can imagine – while still getting your nicotine. If you’re a smoker, you must try vaping in 2021.

Wine

Wine is probably an obvious entrant in any article about great flavour experiences. If you’re a foodie, you’re already well aware of what wine can do to enhance a meal. You’re also aware of the ways in which factors like grape varieties, processing methods and terroir can affect a wine’s flavour. What you might not know, though, is that technology has spurred a veritable revolution in wine production over the past few years. If you’re not a regular wine drinker, it might be because you’re used to having an underwhelming experience when you buy the more affordable brands. An inexpensive wine that hasn’t had a great deal of time to age won’t have the same complexity as an aged wine, and it may even have a slightly off-putting acidic edge. One of the most interesting new technologies in wine production is micro-oxygenation, which adds oxygen to wine in regular intervals to accelerate the aging process. Micro-oxygenation can make an expensive wine taste like more of a premium product.

Heirloom Vegetables

If you’re fortunate enough to have sufficient space and time to maintain a back garden, you’ve experienced the pure pleasure of eating vegetables that you’ve grown yourself. Freshness is a major factor that determines the tastiness of produce, and nothing could possibly be tastier than eating something on the day of harvesting. If you’re growing the same varieties of vegetables that you’d buy at the market, though, you’re not having the type of experience that you could be having. The seeds that mainstream sellers offer, after all, are essentially the same seeds that commercial growers use. They’re not bred for maximum flavour; they’re bred to resist disease, to ripen on a predictable schedule and to tolerate long shipping times. Massive commercial farming has led to markedly decreased crop diversity, and that isn’t just bad for your taste buds – it’s also bad for sustainable agriculture. Next spring, try something different – plant some heirloom vegetables. Becoming a member of a local seed library is a great way to ensure you’ll have a steady supply of heirloom seeds each year.

Tea

We’ve got nothing bad to say about the classic bag of PG Tips – but if you’ve never ventured beyond the world of bagged teas for your morning cuppa, you’re not experiencing the full range of flavour that tea has to offer. First of all, bagged tea usually doesn’t even use the best parts of the tea leaves – it uses the dusty bits left behind after the higher-quality leaves are separated out for sale at higher prices. Even when bagged tea does include the higher-quality leaves, though, a teabag still doesn’t provide the ideal conditions for steeping. The end result is that you have to choose between a cup that isn’t as flavourful as it could be or one that’s so tannic and bitter that you have to mask the undesirable flavours with sugar. If you want to explore the full range of incredible flavours that tea can deliver, you need to start by buying a smart kettle because many teas brew best when the water is a bit below boiling temperature. The famous Japanese tea gyokuro, for instance, brews best at temperatures below 60 degrees Celsius. It’s absolutely worth the trouble to learn how to brew great tea properly, though, and you may find that it completely reinvigorates your morning routine.

Coffee

While there may not have been any massive technological revolutions in the world of coffee growing over the past several years, the same definitely can’t be said of coffee brewing technology. In fact, it sometimes feels as though some revolutionary new coffee gadget comes along every year and changes the world of home coffee making entirely. Considering that each brewing method gives you a slightly different experience from a flavour standpoint, there’s really no end to the variety that you can enjoy as a coffee drinker. If you enjoy a low-effort brew, for instance, you should try cold-brewed coffee. All that you need to do is stir coarse-ground coffee and water together and let the mixture steep in your refrigerator. After 12-24 hours, you can filter the coffee grounds out. You’ll be left with a coffee concentrate that’s low in acid and notably high in caffeine. Add a bit of the concentrate to a cup along with some water and milk for a vibrant chilled coffee.