About

Hello. Welcome to the Tasteless Kitchen.

I’m Louis. I’m not a chef, not a food writer, not a podcaster or an influencer. I just like eating and I like cooking.

Or at least, I did.

Because not that long ago, I went through a stretch where cooking felt pointless and eating was reduced to little more than stopping myself from being hungry.

I’d lost my sense of smell.

Smell does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to taste. People think it’s all in the tongue, but it isn’t. Your tongue can tell you if something is salty, sweet, sour, bitter, or umami, but the detail, the difference between flavours, comes from your nose. Take that away, and you lose something like 75–90% of what we think of as taste.

So if you can’t really taste what you’re cooking, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re putting in a lot of effort… for very little reward.

There are plenty of ways this can happen. The medical term is anosmia. My mum lost her sense of smell decades ago after damage to her olfactory nerves. In my case, like a lot of people, it was COVID. But it can also come from sinus issues, injury, even stress.

However it arrives, it’s not a trivial thing to live with. The parts of the brain that process smell are tightly connected to the parts that handle pleasure and memory, which is why studies consistently link smell loss to problems with mood and cognition.

Full disclosure: mine has come back a bit. Not fully, not reliably, but enough to know what I’m missing.

So I had a choice: give up on cooking, or learn how to do it differently.

I chose the latter.

I learned how to cook food that’s still genuinely enjoyable, even if you can’t really taste it in the conventional way.

And that’s what this is.

The Tasteless Kitchen.

A few principles to start with:

• First: your tongue still matters. You can reliably taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami, so use them deliberately.
• Second: heat still works. Spiciness isn’t taste, it’s a physical sensation and it cuts through even without smell.
• Third: texture becomes critical. Crunch, softness, contrast… these start doing the work flavour used to do.
• Fourth: you’re not starting from scratch. Plenty of classic dishes already lean on these things, you just need to recognise them.

And the best part is, this isn’t just for people without a sense of smell. This is just… good food.

So whether you’ve got anosmia yourself, you’re cooking for someone who has, or you’re just curious

there’s something here for you.