Tips for making airplane food bearable
Airplane meals are notorious for their incredible blandness, lack of flavor, tastelessness, rubberiness, you name it. It’s comparable to hospital food: you eat it because it’s in front of you, not necessarily because you want to. Surely there must be something you can do about that?
There definitely is. Besides throwing money at it and flying business class, where the food is always better and the grass is always greener, you can simply follow these five tips to make your airplane meal more bearable.
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Hot sauce
You don’t need an airplane to pour hot sauce over everything. Whether it’s sambal, Sriracha, Tabasco or hot sauce, it adds just that little bit (or a lot) of kick to your food that it was missing before. The fact that you can only taste pepper afterward isn’t such a bad thing.
Take your spice rack to go
Since your food can taste rather bland—or actually not taste like much at all—it can’t hurt to add extra herbs and spices. Garlic, onion and paprika powder, for example, can work wonders for your boring bowl of boiled potatoes or piece of meat. Just be careful with salt, because many airlines already add extra salt to their food. At altitude, your taste buds don’t recognize salt as well.
Umami
Again, because of the altitude, your taste buds are slightly confused and don’t work as well as you’d like. The only flavor that remains intact is umami. So choose a meal that contains it. Tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms and soy sauce are umami-rich ingredients. So bring a bottle of soy sauce and hot sauce. Just make sure customs doesn’t confiscate them.
Moisture
Because of the dry cabin air and the early preparation of your meal, your piece of chicken or beef may well be rather … tough. Choose a meal with plenty of moisture. Soup, for example. For something more substantial, curry is a good option. The spices in curry can even be enhanced rather than muted. That makes up for the dry chicken/rice/beans.
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Drown out the noise
This may sound a little illogical and strange, but remember that this is a tip from crazy ass (but brilliant) chef Heston Blumenthal. Then it makes perfect sense. Since airplanes can be noisy and your taste buds and receptors already have a hard enough time under these harsh conditions, it’s a good idea to shut out external stimuli as much as possible. Or, as Heston discovered: play a podcast with lots of tinkling sounds—high notes that stimulate your sweet receptors and low tones that awaken your bitter receptors. We therefore recommend putting on headphones (without music, but with certain high or low tones) or wearing earplugs. Pause the movie for a moment and focus entirely on your food.
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