Improve your Vocabulary: Learn 26 adjectives to describe the taste and texture of food!

106,466 views ・ 2020-03-25

English with Alex


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Ah, it's so crunchy.
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Salty, too.
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I'm almost done.
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Ah, okay.
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Now, I have energy.
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Hey everyone, I'm Alex, thanks for clicking, and welcome to this lesson on how to talk
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about food.
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So today, I'm on a picnic, and I'm going to give you a lot of adjectives and words that
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you can use to talk about the taste, the flavor, the character, the sound of food.
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Now, this vocabulary is going to be very useful because we all eat, right?
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We know that.
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So, you can use it when you're having food in a restaurant when you're having lunch with
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your friends, when you're having breakfast, when you're having dinner, anytime you're
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eating, you can use this vocabulary to describe the food that you're eating.
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It's a very common, human experience.
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So, let's go and start looking at some flavors of food.
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So first, we have the word "sweet".
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So, we're going to do some pronunciation in this video too, so repeat after me: sweet.
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So, anything that has sugar in it, so think of milk chocolate, right, that is very sweet.
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Desserts like cakes and cookies are usually sweet.
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Next, repeat after me: sour.
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Think of a lemon, right?
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I have a lemon here, and if you stick around to the end of this video, I am going to take
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a bite of this lemon, so lemons make your face go - mm - right?
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If you go to Chinese restaurant, sometimes you can get sweet and sour pork, so sometimes
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you have sweet and sour mixed together.
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Next, we have bitter.
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Okay, so bitter is something like medicine or dark chocolate or black coffee, it's not
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a very great flavor.
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Most people don't like bitter food.
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Think of, again, syrup that you take, or if you have Aspirin or Tylenol, these things
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are bitter.
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Dark chocolate, like 80% dark chocolate tastes very bitter.
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Next, bland.
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Now, I love potatoes, but if you put no salt in the potatoes, or nothing else in the potatoes,
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and they're very boring to eat, they have no flavor, they are bland.
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So, think of anything with no spices that has no salt and has no taste, no flavor, it's
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boring, it's - repeat after me - bland.
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So, obviously, bland has a negative meaning, but sometimes you want something that is normal,
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regular, and you can say "plain".
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So, if something is plain, this doesn't have a negative meaning.
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Sometimes you want to eat a plain donut, for example, with, you know, no frosting or syrups
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or anything, just regular, normal, nothing special, but still good.
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Okay?
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Next, I put spicy.
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Now, I put a star beside spicy, because I don't think of spicy as a flavor, really,
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it's more of like a temperature of food, so think of like jalape�o peppers are very
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spicy, hot.
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So, a lot of Thai food is very spicy, okay?
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Szechuan cuisine is also very spicy.
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Mexican food, a lot of Mexican food can be very spicy and maybe you have a lot of spicy
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food in your cuisine as well.
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From Poland, we don't do spicy.
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I'm used to spicy now, but when I was growing up, we didn't have spicy food, just potatoes,
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meat, vegetables, usually plain stuff, and maybe some salt, but that's about it.
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Next, we have salty.
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So, I love salty snacks.
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When we started this video, I had a little salty cracker, so stuff that has salt, like
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chips, are very salty.
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Sometimes, you want to lick your fingers because it tastes good.
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I'm not going to do that on camera because it's very rude, so next, savory.
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So, repeat after me: savory.
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So, when you think of savory, it kind of links with salty and spicy, could be mixed together.
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It's the opposite of sweet.
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So, think of like, a creamy soup that is a little salty and you just feel very comfortable
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when you're eating it and - mm - it's very savory, it just, it's dancing on your tongue
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because it's salty, it's nice, it tastes good, and it's not sweet, so when you think of savory,
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think of like, salty, sometimes mixed with spicy, okay?
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Alright.
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Next, let's look at some tastes and textures of food.
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So, we have first, repeat after me: crunchy.
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Think of the sound when I was eating the cracker - crunch, crunch, crunch - right?
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So, this is crunchy food.
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Crackers, which I have here, are crunchy.
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If you have a fresh apple, right, and it's hard when you bite it - crunch - it's going
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to be crunchy, okay?
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So, think of the sound, right, of like breaking glass together as being crunchy.
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Linked with crunchy is crispy.
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So, chips are also crispy.
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Fried chicken is crispy.
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Any food that you fry in oil, okay, if you make it with oil and the outside is hard,
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like a little hard, like the outside of the chicken skin if you fry it in oil, this is
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called crispy.
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It's also why in British English, potato chips are called "crisps", right?
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So, they're called crisps, they're crispy.
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Crispy food is usually crunchy, okay?
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So, if you come from a country that has a lot of fried food, where you fry your food
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or deep fry your food in oil, that food is probably crispy and crunchy.
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Next, I hate this texture, so mealy.
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So, repeat after me: mealy.
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So, mealy is an apple or a tomato and they're a little too soft.
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You bite it and it's not fresh.
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It's not crunchy.
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It kind of tastes like you're eating sand from the beach, okay?
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So, if something is mealy, it's soft and sandy.
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It's not a good texture in your mouth.
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It tastes like you're eating sand.
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So, I hate mealy apples and mealy tomatoes.
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You probably do, too.
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You want a fresh apple, a nice crunchy apple, right?
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Next, mushy.
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So, it just so happens I went to my mom's house today and I got clementine.
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This clementine is a little old.
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When I press it, ugh, it's a little too soft.
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Ugh, it's very soft.
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So, if something is mushy, like it's not hard anymore, it's not fresh anymore, it's too
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soft, it's mushy.
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Now, you can also pronounce this, some people say "mochy", okay, so you can say "mochy"
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or "muchy", and it feels like Play-Doh, like I could make something with this.
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So, this is a mushy clementine.
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I am definitely not eating that.
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Next, soggy.
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Now, the most common food I think of when I think of soggy is cereal with milk.
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So, obviously when you have cereal, you put milk, after about 30 seconds, one minute,
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perfect time to eat, right?
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It's not too crunchy, it's not too wet, but if you are a slow eater and you leave your
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cereal for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, you come back and you look at it, ugh, and the
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milk is dripping from the cereal, it's soggy, okay?
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It's not good anymore.
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I mean, you can eat it, but it's wet, alright?
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The milk is inside the cereal now, and it's too wet, okay?
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Next, let's do, yeah, we'll do tender.
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So, tender usually you use this when you're talking about meat.
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So, if meat is soft, well cooked, and you know, you put it in your mouth and it just
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melts in your mouth, it is tender.
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So, a tender pork chop, or a tender steak, a tender piece of chicken, like it's not too
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hard, not too tough, it's soft and tender.
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So, you want your meat, if you eat meat, to be tender.
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You don't want it to be hard, so think of soft meat, okay?
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So first, repeat after me, and actually repeat this word first: soggy - tender.
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Okay.
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And let's repeat the next one: juicy.
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So, many vegetables and fruits can be juicy, so this tomato, I'm not going to bite it now,
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but I can feel it, like it's the right amount of ready to be eaten.
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So, if I bite this, I'm going to make a big mess, have lots of juice on my mouth, this
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is a juicy tomato, okay?
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You can also have many juicy fruits, juicy grapes, juicy peaches, alright, anything that
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you bite and you have water coming down your chin, this is juicy.
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It's very juicy, full of juice, right?
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Alright, next, we have, repeat: fatty.
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So, this one is easy to guess, I think.
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You have the word "fat" and if something has a lot of fat, like if you have a steak, for
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example, and you have more fat than actual meat, you can say "Ugh, this steak is too
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fatty.", so usually meat is too fatty, alright?
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If you get a bad cut of meat, it is fatty.
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And linked with fatty, we have oily and greasy.
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So, let's repeat those words with me: oily - greasy.
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You see the word "oil", right?
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So, if you say "Ugh, this food is oily", okay, or "This food is greasy", usually if you have
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fried food, you fry food in oil, if you put too much oil or you don't cook it the right
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way, it will end up oily and greasy.
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So, think of if you order a pizza, I remember this pizza place I used to order pizza from
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all the time, when I ordered the pizza, the bottom of the box, you could see the oil underneath
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the box.
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They used so much, I guess in the cheese and when they were making the dough, I don't know
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what they were doing, but the bottom of the box had a lot of oil and grease, so the pizza
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was greasy.
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You could think of a greasy hamburger, for example.
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A lot of people say "Alright, after you - if you drink too much, if you go to the pub after,
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it's good to have some greasy food."
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So like, chicken wings and hamburgers and French fries with a lot of oil can also be
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greasy.
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Just ugh, you need to wash your hands with soap after that.
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Okay, and we're almost finished, so let's go to talk about like the character of some
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food.
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So, we have these kind of go together: rich.
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So, repeat after me: rich.
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Decadent.
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Heavy.
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So, food that is rich is usually made with a lot of butter, a lot of cream, and it has
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a lot of calories, right?
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So, this is food that is heavy, that makes your stomach feel bleh, like you're so full,
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because it is so loaded, so packed with these creams and butters and sugars.
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Now, basically, this is food with a lot of calories.
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Decadent, usually we refer to desserts, like big chocolate cakes, as decadent.
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It's too much, it's too rich, it's too full.
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Heavy, like hamburgers with French fries and gravy, that is a heavy meal.
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Okay?
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So, think of these words in kind of one family.
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Rich, decadent, heavy, calorie rich foods like, foods that are heavy with calories.
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Right, next: ripe.
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So, ripe, we refer to fruit as being ripe most often.
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So, if fruit is ripe or a vegetable is ripe, it means it is ready to be eaten.
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So, yeah, this is a ripe apple, it is ready to be eaten.
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If you have a banana, if the banana is green, it is not ripe.
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It is not ready to be eaten.
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When the banana turns yellow, okay, the banana is ripe, it's ready to be eaten.
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You can take it from the tree and you can eat it.
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Like this tomato, I'm going to eat this probably by myself later because yeah, this is a good
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tomato, it's ripe, it's ready, okay?
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So, next: light.
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So, if you, you can have a light dessert.
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Something that doesn't have a lot of sugar or cream and it tastes just hmm, you don't
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feel it when you eat it, right?
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You can have a very soft cake.
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So, a soft cake, you can say "Ah, this tastes very light", not heavy, not loaded with cream
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and calories, it's light, it's nice.
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You don't feel guilty after eating it.
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Alright, next: burned.
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So, burned you can kind of tell if you have fried food and the food on the outside is
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black from too much fire, you cooked it too long, you put too much oil and it's on high
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heat, it is burned.
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So, repeat after me: burned.
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Alright, and we have two more.
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We have undercooked and overcooked.
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So usually, you can do this with many things, but usually we talk about meat as being undercooked
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or overcooked.
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It's - if something is undercooked, it means you didn't cook it long enough.
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So, for example, chicken.
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If you cut a piece of chicken and you see inside the chicken is pink, you can also say
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the chicken is raw, r-a-w, raw, or it's not cooked properly.
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It's undercooked, okay?
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Something is overcooked usually when it's burned, if you overcook something, it is burned.
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Think of a steak.
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I will go back to steak because I like steak, so if you eat steak, and you cook it and you
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leave it on the barbeque or inside, you know, your oven for too long, it becomes black or
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it becomes very hard, very tough, not tender, it is overcooked, okay?
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That's a lot of vocabulary today, guys.
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So, I hope that you will take the words you learned today and apply them when you're eating
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out with your friends, with your family, or by yourself, you can practice vocabulary by
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yourself, right?
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This is a juicy apple.
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This is a sour lemon.
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Whatever.
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Okay.
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Now, if you want to test your understanding of all the material we learned today, as always,
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you can check out the quiz on www.engvid.com and also, don't forget, you can check me out
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on Facebook, on Twitter, subscribe to my YouTube channel, hit that little bell and leave a
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comment for me.
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Do you prefer salty snacks, or do you prefer sweet snacks?
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Do you like spicy food?
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Tell me what you like.
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Tell me what you don't like, and we can have a conversation and continue talking forever
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and ever as long as you keep commenting, I'll do my best to reply to as many of you as possible.
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Until next time, thanks for - ah, I said I was going to eat a lemon, didn't I?
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Now, I've never done this before.
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I've only eaten oranges and clementines.
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I put lemon in my tea sometimes.
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I put it on fish occasionally, but I've never eaten a lemon just like this.
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Whew.
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I'm getting nervous now.
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You ready?
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I'm just going to take one bite.
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It's juicy and very sour!
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Very sour!
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