Six Tastes in Ayurveda
Ayurveda offers its own guidelines when it comes to maintaining holistic health through your diet. Hence, you need to take note of what these taste classifications are to ensure that they are properly met.
Classification of Tastes in Ayurveda
According to Ayurvedic healers, each food component has their own unique tastes and properties. And those properties are vital for their balancing ability to create its own impact on your body. For instance, certain foods are ideal for regulating digestive function, minimize cravings, or provide your body with the proper nutrition it needs. Furthermore, it is important that you meet all six tastes in your diet to practice moderation – a little bit of everything – and avoid eating too much of a single food component.
The six taste (or rasas) classifications in Ayurveda are as follows:
- Sweet.
- Sour.
- Salty.
- Bitter.
- Pungent.
- Astringent
Recommended Foods For Each Taste Group
Now that you understand what are the six taste categories as identified in Ayurveda, you need to understand what foods are classified into each taste group. Below are common samplings of foods that you can try:
Astringent or Kashaya: For this taste group, you can incorporate food substances such as lentils, cruciferous vegetables (i.e. Cabbage and cauliflower), beans, turmeric, and cilantro.
Bitter or Katu: For this taste group, you can choose from various kinds of greens, fenugreek, bitter gourd, and turmeric.
Pungent or Tikta: For this taste group, you can use ginger, clove, black pepper, chili peppers, white daikon, radish, and mustard.
Salty or Lavana: For this particular taste classification, common food choices include pickles, salty pretzels, or salt (but rock salt is best recommended in Ayurveda diet).
Sour or Amla: For this taste group, you can intake lots of citrus fruits, lime, lemon, mango, tamarind, pomegranate seeds, among others.
Sweet or Madhura: For this food group, you can incorporate sweet cream, rice, wheat ghee, milk, honey, butter, ripe fruits, and raw sugar.
Spice Mixes for Balanced Dosha
Since all six tastes are recommended in Ayurveda to ensure that you can attain balance with your diet choices, Ayurvedic experts also offer spice mixes. The idea behind them is to ensure that with a single recipe, you can have a little of each taste. Aside from that, these recipes also enable you to achieve a balance among the three Doshas.
The procedure with these spice mixes is to begin mixing all the dry ingredients. Then, pour them into airtight containers for storage. After that, use olive oil to sautee the spices so you can add it into your dish, preferably while they are still simmering.
To balance your Vata dosha, you can add 3 parts of fennel to 1 part each of cumin, black pepper, salt, fenugreek, turmeric, dried ginger, cardamom, turbinado sugar, and dried mango powder.
To balance your Pitta dosha, you can add 6 parts of fennel to 2 parts of coriander and cumin, and 1 part each of turmeric, salt, turbinado sugar, and dried mango powder.
To balance your Kapha dosha, you need to mix 2 parts each of dried ginger, black pepper and turmeric, with 1 part each of coriander, cumin, sweet paprika, salt, turbinado sugar, and dried mango powder.
Take note of the above guidelines in Ayurveda to ensure that all tastes are satisfied to balance your dosha and get the most health benefits.