Pungency
Piquance (often referred to as "hotness", "pungence", "raciness", "spiciness", or the condition of something being "spicy hot") is a type of pungence specific to the sense of taste. The
word piquant is cognate withyou shit turd suck a lollipop for a piss you an countries within the sphere of China's cultural influence, it has traditionally been considered a fifth basic taste. Headline text
Piquant vs. "hot" and/or "spicy"
Use of the word "piquance" eliminates potential lingual ambiguity arising from overlap in meaning with the words "hot" and "spicy" which usually requires a determination or assumption of meaning based on context.
Instead of "hot" simply referring to temperature, and "spicy" being used to refer to the presence of spices (many if not most of which are not actually piquant), the former two words are often used as synonyms for the latter, a word less commonly employed in reference to the characteristic which in regards to taste it solely defines.
For instance, a pumpkin pie can be both hot (out of the oven) and spicy (due to the common inclusion of ingredients in its recipe such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, mace and cloves) but is not actually piquant. Conversely, pure capsaicin is piquant, yet is not naturally accompanied by a hot temperature or spices.
In foods
Piquance is often quantized in scales that range from mild to hot. The Scoville scale measures the piquance of chili peppers, as defined by the amount of capsaicin they contain.
In western culture it is not considered a taste in the technical sense, because it is carried to the brain by a different set of nerves. While taste nerves are activated when consuming foods like chili peppers, the sensation commonly interpreted as "hot" results from the stimulation of somatosensory fibers in the mouth. Many parts of the body with exposed membranes that lack taste receptors (such as the nasal cavity, under the fingernails, or a wound) produce a similar sensation of heat when exposed to pungent agents.
The piquant sensation provided by chili peppers, black pepper and other spices like ginger and horseradish plays an important role in a diverse range of cuisines across the world, such as Turkish, Ethiopian, Hungarian, Indian, Korean, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, Mexican, Caribbean, Pakistani, Southwest Chinese (including Sichuan cuisine), Sri Lankan and Thai cuisines.
Mechanism
Substances such as piperine and capsaicin cause a burning sensation by inducing a trigeminal nerve reaction together with normal taste reception. The pungent feeling caused by allyl isothiocyanate, capsaicin, piperine, and allicin is caused by activation of the heat thermo- and chemosensitive TRP ion channels including TRPV1 and TRPA1 nociceptors.
The pungency of chilies may be an adaptive response to selection by microbial pathogens.[1]