Materials:
Apple, pear, cooked potato, and onion slices
Mouth
Nose

What To Do:
Hold the apple or the onion under your nose while eating a slice of potato. Substitute pear for potato. You should find that smelling an apple while eating a pear will actually make the pear taste like an apple, while eating a pear or potato while smelling an onion will make you taste onion.

The reason is that very little of what we think of as “flavor” actually happens on the tongue. Your taste buds can only sense five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory). Anything else comes from the thousands ofolfactory receptors in our nasal cavities. These receptors create the more subtle and intense aspects of flavor that we perceive.

More:
Try your own combinations of strongly scented or flavored foods and mild ones. Compare cooked and raw foods. What if the textures of the foods are different?