Real Easy English: Talking about tastes
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Hello and welcome to Real Easy English, the podcast where we have real conversations in easy English to help you learn. I'm Georgie. And I'm Neil. You can read along with this podcast because we have a transcript on our website and a worksheet too. It's all free. Go to bbclearningenglish.com. So Neil, how is your week going? Have you eaten anything tasty recently?

Yes, I have. I had a very delicious lunch actually. Good. Well, today we are talking about food and specifically the taste of a food. This is the flavour of something, so what it is like in your mouth. So, for example, lemons are sour and sugary things like chocolate are sweet. So, Neil, what types of food do you like the taste of? Well, I really like savoury food actually. So,

the opposite of sweet, things that have strong flavours, salty flavours and often spicy food. I have a sweet tooth. That means that I really like sweet foods like chocolate, biscuits, things like that. Ice cream? Yeah, love ice cream. So do you not like the taste of sweet things? I also really like the taste of sweet things, but I think

If I had to choose, I'd choose a savoury snack rather than a sweet snack. OK, so we're opposites. Are there any types of foods that you hate the taste of? Not really. I like most food,

But there is one food that I don't like very much because it's just too strong, too bitter, is rocket. I really don't like rocket. Interesting. Rocket is a type of salad, isn't it? Yeah, it's a leaf. How about you? I don't like sour things. So I told you I like sweet things, but desserts that are sour, for example, like a lemon tart or a lemon ice cream, I really don't like.

I much prefer something with lots of sugar in it. Are there any foods that you have never tried but you would like to try?

I've never had insects. I know that in other countries they can be a common food and I've never tried insects and I would be interested in seeing what those taste like. What do you think they taste like? Well, I have actually tried some ants before from Colombia and I thought they were OK. They were fine. They were not my favourite kind of food, but they were OK. Were they salty?

They were a bit like nuts, actually, because they were kind of dried out, quite big and dried out. OK, interesting. So salty, not sweet? No, but I think they had salt on them. What about you, Neil? Is there anything you would like to try that you have never tried before?

Yeah, so I really like fermented food, things like sauerkraut and kimchi from Korea. I would like to try more fermented foods. I know that there are fermented foods from lots of different places in the world that I've never tried, so fermented food. Sounds good. Those fermented foods have quite a strong taste, don't they? Yeah, strong and sour, what we call tangy. Mm-hmm.

I'd like to try some of those. And what about this question? Is there a food you used to hate that you now like the taste of? Not hate, but I think there are some foods that I wasn't sure about and then I got to like them. I think...

when I went to Japan, there were lots of flavors that were very unfamiliar to me. And then once I understood these flavors, I really liked them. - You got used to them. - I got used to them, yeah.

How about you? I used to really hate nuts, but now I don't mind them so much. It wasn't the taste that I didn't like. It was the texture, how it feels when you crunch the food. I didn't like that, but it's fine now. Texture is really important, isn't it? Food sometimes is...

The texture rather than the flavour that you don't like or like. Exactly. Often people don't like mushrooms because of the texture, because they're a bit slimy. Slimy is like a snake. Yeah. Except snakes. Snakes are not actually slimy. They look slimy. Yeah. Like it's wet, basically. You don't like wet food.

Let's recap the vocabulary that we've talked about today. We had 'taste'. Taste is the flavour of food in your mouth and it's also a verb – to taste, you taste something. We had 'sour' – a sharp, sometimes unpleasant taste. For example, lemons taste sour. 'Bitter' is a strong, sometimes not very nice flavour. For example, very strong black coffee can be bitter.

We talked about foods that are savoury or salty. This means they have a taste of salt. They are the opposite of sweet things. For example, bacon. And we also heard spicy. Spicy is sometimes also called hot, but it's not a hot temperature. It feels hot in your mouth, like when you eat a chilli.

And that's it for this episode of Real Easy English. Remember, you can test what you've learned using a worksheet on our website bbclearningenglish.com. We'll be back with more easy English conversations to help you learn. Thanks for joining us and goodbye. Goodbye.

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