MUST-KNOW Adjectives to describe food in English | Advanced English vocabulary

hi there this is Harry and welcome back to Advanced English lessons with Harry where we tried to help you to get a better understanding of the English language the lesson today is all about food but it's Advanced English adjectives that we use to describe food okay so it's not a food lesson as such I'm not going to talk about recipes you'll be very glad to hear I'm not even going to tell you what to cook so it's only about food and it's about tastes and smells and the adjectives that we can use to describe those so it's Advanced English lesson with adjectives connected with food so we've got 13 particular adjectives that we will use and in some cases they may sound similar you might have some words that you've heard before but a lot of them you may not and we use them to describe particular smells or particular tastes and at the end of this particular lesson I'm also going to give you a few specific words that we use only to describe certain types of foods and that's really really important to understand those okay so let's go down to them one by one Bland well if you get some food that is Bland it's really tasteless so tasteless would be another adjective you could use but bland is something like eating wet paper some food just absolutely no taste it's either been overcooked or to just aren't enough spices or some salt or Pepper or something that could be added to give it some flavor but it's just very Bland like baking an omelette with no mushrooms or tomatoes or onions or anything in it yeah so that might be a little bit Bland in its taste in other words the next word insipid is very similar to Bland it has the same meaning but this is a little bit more formal insipid for me is something again that has zero taste things like consomme soup with without any vegetables meat or anything else in it I really just don't like it tea is another drink that I find very insipid because every time you have a little taste that there's nothing it's just you might as well be drinking hot water okay so Bland and insipid very very similar nothingness or tasteless Tangy on the other hand is much much more zest in it here Tangy would describe that freshly squeezed orange juice that you get when you go on holidays so you can still get the little Pips floating around on the top of the glass and the little bits of orange in it so it's really freshly squeezed and it's got a real zip to it and it's Tangy yes or a glass of lime juice or and lemon juice that have also been freshly squeezed and little bit bitter but it really is Tangy and it will take away or kill any thirst that you might have so Tangy next word is pungent and pungent does everything to do with the smell it affects the nose so when you come into a room there's a strong pungent smell it could be decaying fruit it could be a smell like ammonia or rotten eggs and it really really hits you at the back of the throat right up the nose Okay so a pungent smell so this is all about the smells rather than the taste so you come back from a holiday and somebody has left some food in the rubbish bin they didn't throw out at before you you went on holidays and you know there's a black banana and you can get that sickly smell as you walk into the the kitchen and that's very pungent and as always if you like this particular lesson then please like the video and if you can subscribe to the channel because it really really helps the next is the word connected with bread stale stale bread is that bread that has been sitting in the Bread Basket for four or five days and it's rock hard and almost something you could knock Nails into the wall with yeah so a very very hard stale bread we used to do with stale bread is soak it in water and then take it to the park and feed it to the swans of the doctor whichever birds were happen to be sitting there but it's not pleasant for you or I to eat when it's stale it's so hard you'd probably break your teeth so it's all about the taste stale bread rancid rancid has everything to do with things like butter okay butter when you open it usually has a nice fresh golden yellow color and it's a nice oil and shiny whereas when it's rancid it loses that's the color and The Taste is awful so we use that word and specifically when we're talking about butter Rancid the next word is dodgy so we get the pronunciation study when something is study it's usually heavy heavy fat meat lots of potatoes lots of those earthy type vegetables that are great in the winter time they will fill you up but wow it takes a long time to digest them so you can't eat too much of it so if you eat too much starchy food you feel bloated and you're hardly able to move lots of people in northern Europe tend to eat more stodgy food because of the cold wet weather that we experience also like a big plate of porridge that's a a nice breakfast to warm you in the winter time but it can be a little bit stodgy depending on how you make it and yeah it sits in the stomach for a long long time you certainly won't be hungry after a couple of hours if you've you've eaten a plate of Scottish porridge foreign well chewy is that good experience when you like your food you chew it well but chewy in a negative sense is when the meat has been overcooked perhaps or it is a poor piece of meat and a cheap piece of meat and therefore you seem to be chewing it for hours like eating the soul off your shoe okay so oh that meat is very chewy it's that I can hardly cut it with the knife so it's a good sign that it has been overcooked chewy and lots of food can be chewy the next word when this is the two we had that are very similar in the sound chewy and gooey okay now gooey I really like and gooey is if you can picture this when you make yourself a toastier ham and cheese toasted sandwich and if you do it correct when you take it out of the the toaster or out of the sandwich maker you'll have the soft cheese oozing out of the sides of the the sandwich and it's gooey and really really tasty absolutely lovely yeah so gooey and you also get it when you taste or eat in Swiss restaurants where they love to have fondues cheese fondue and you you dip your fork or your knife or skewer with bread on the end of it into the fondue and there's a lot of gooey cheese on the end of the bread but wow that is certainly study because you've got lots of bread and lots of cheese but it is gooey gooey and stodgy at the same time okay I don't like fondue myself but I do as I said love those cheese and ham Toasties which should have that wonderful smell of gooey cheese crispy is next if you're on the talking about foods and nice foods to have if you're like burgers we all like burgers and if you top it with cheese and then sometimes we put crispy bacon on the top of that wow that's really nice where the bacon breaks in the middle really crispy and the other thing that we like when it's crispy is the skin of the turkey that when we roast the turkey for Christmas dinner the skin of the turkey is really Brown and crispy and it adds a lovely lovely flavor to the meat when you carve it very very pleasant so that's crispy crispy bacon or the crispy skin on the turkey that's been roasted specifically for Thanksgiving or for Christmas crunchy crunchy is the word we use when we're describing that sensation when we bite into that Golden Delicious green apple there we've just washed it and we either cut it and then bite it and you get that lovely crunchy sound well the crunch you get when you're crunching your cornflakes or the crunch the dog makes when he's crunching his biscuits that he that you give him okay so nice nice crunchy sound Savory Savory is usually the opposite of sweet sweet as usually honey and sugar and things like that but Savory is something that has a different taste it's not a sweet taste for example an omelet with tomatoes and onions or ham that would have a Savory and was been would be known as a Savory omelet or a crepe that you make and without adding sugar or honey instead you put maybe a fried egg like the French do some chopped ham absolutely gorgeous so that would be a Savory crepe or savory omelette something really tasty but not sweet and then finally we've got moldy now the pronunciation is mold it's not moldy it's moldy moldy cheese some people like it yeah some different types of cheeses are sold as moldy cheese yeah but I don't like it I prefer the a little bit fresher okay now mold is also used sorry a word that we use when we look at our windows in a room at the back of the house that doesn't get the sunshine and if you haven't opened the windows for a while you'll see little black spots of mold around the window yes and this is exactly the same as you get on the cheese so black mold or moldy so mold as a noun moldy as as the the adjective okay so moldy old cheese some people like it some people don't okay so they are our adjectives these are our Advanced adjectives describing food mostly As I said tastes or smell so let me give them to you one more time Bland insipid Tangy pungent stale Rancid stodgy chewy gooey crispy crunchy Savory and then finally moldy yeah and remember the pronunciation moldy gooey chewy okay so they all have those y sounds and because they are adjectives after all now I did promise that I would also give you some specific words relating to specific foods and these words be really careful we only use them in connection with these particular Foods so the first is stale always stale bread stale bread that bread that is four or five days old hard to bite hard to chew and you can knock it on the table or use it to hammer Nails into the wall stale bread next is sour s-o-u-r sour milk now sour milk is when the milk has gone off it would sort of break into two parts water at the bottom the milk at the top and or be a terrible smell and certainly a terrible taste it would be all lumpy okay so not something really Pleasant at all but we only use the word sour when we're really relating to milk or milk products sour milk sour cream next word we have is rotten this word we use when we're talking about bad fruit bad vegetables bad meat so the meat that has been sitting in the fridge longer than it should the vegetables that we left in the the tray at the bottom of the cupboard the fruit that we left in the fruit bowl for five or six days so the banana has gone all black and gooey the vegetables have gone soft and they've got bits of flakes on them and then they've gone a bit soggy and wet and oh just not so nice not such a bad smell but just not so nice to pick up and then the meat of course just really really bad so we we use the word rotten so it's not rotten bread or rotten milk it's stale bread sour milk rotten vegetables rotten meat and rotten fruit okay and then finally rancid butter rancid and rancid is when the butter loses its look its color and The Taste is not so nice and you don't want to eat it you'll probably not be so sick but it's not so pleasant so the butter is rancid and it's time to to buy some new butter okay so there the all of the adjectives that we're using the advanced English adjectives connected with food and those particular words those four words that I've just given you there stale sour rancid and rotten only used with specific food types okay so you know the drill by now you need to practice these you need to look at them you need to listen to them once or twice if you have any problems you come back to me and I'll give you some more examples as always I really really appreciate you watching and listening join me again soon Harry saying goodbye

Channel: Learn English with Harry

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Keywords: advanced english lessons, learn english vocabulary, advanced english adjectives, advanced english vocabulary, improve english speaking, English speaking skills, learn English, learn English with Harry, speak better English with Harry podcast, english vocabulary, english expressions, english adjectives, food adjectives in english, describe food in english

Id: QG5WET3ZlEM

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022