Definition
Pungent refers to a strong and sharp taste or smell that is often unpleasant, but can also be stimulating and invigorating.
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Excerpts from News Articles
Pattani launched its Puangmanee durian season on Thursday, with promotions designed to lure the lucrative Chinese market for this unique variety of the pungent fruit.
While the fire has been largely put out, a thick cloud of smoke and methane gas continues to cover the area, reducing visibility and the city’s air quality, while emitting a lingering, pungent odor.
I haven’t visited the New York Earth Room, Walter De Maria’s sculpture installation in SoHo, which opened in 1977, but I’ll do my best to channel the scent of its 22 inches of soil covering a 3,600-square-foot indoor area. A plate of mushrooms might evoke a similar earthiness: The truffle mushroom salad at Ye’s Apothecary, on the Lower East Side, includes enoki, clamshell and king oyster mushrooms, all laced with pungent truffle oil. While you’re at it, sip an on-theme cocktail — the Drunken Farmer is made with duck fat-washed Scotch, corn and chestnuts.
“Empty and aching, like the narrator of Paul Simon’s America, Sharlet drives cross-country, from a Sacramento rally for the insurrectionist martyr Ashli Babbitt to his home in Vermont, searching for the answer to Trump’s American carnage but equally for indelible images, pungent phrases—the stuff of myth—that will give shape to his own grief as well as ‘the grief that is in us all now,’ a heartsickness born of ‘the passing of certain possibilities—democratic, ecological— . .
The pungent stench of urine was still lingering in his small unit for two when Mr Hadi spoke to TODAY, despite the fact that his co-tenant had moved out about two weeks earlier.
This is a kitchen that knows how to fry, evinced again when I bite into crisp little squares of tofu in a salad of lettuce, red onion and cashews. Sparkling with lime in its dressing, the appetizer is garnished with julienne tart green apple, which Ratana adds to counter the neutrality of tofu. Pork — shoulder and loin — is ground to a paste, seasoned with white pepper and sugar and formed into meatballs that are threaded on a skewer and grilled. The springy street food staple comes with a tamarind sauce that’s pungent with cilantro.
Of my 50 or so fellow passengers, only a handful were British. A fair few Americans were on board (like me, they presumably found Eurostar fares off-putting), but most were EU citizens. Crossing the River Medway coincided with someone opening an overpoweringly pungent snack, which seems to be infused with weapons-grade garlic. The mood on board darkened.
For more than a thousand years, the spicy, pungent Korean cabbage dish known as kimchi was fermented in earthenware vessels called “onggi.” Now, a pair of mechanical engineers have unraveled why these ancient Tupperware, made of mud slapped and pressed by hand and spun on a pottery wheel, are exquisitely suited to fostering the growth of probiotic microbes that transform humble cabbage into a culinary superstar.
When I traveled to Korea with my mom almost 50 years after she’d emigrated, we were both disappointed to find that much of the food had, in our minds, become Americanized — becoming milder and lighter than what we thought Korean food should be. When we inquired about where to find the more pungent , traditional dishes we craved, locals laughed at us. “You’re so old-fashioned!” they said. “No one in Korea eats that way anymore.”
The stilton-washed gin, also a Crispell concoction, I have made is a lot more pungent . I shake it with ice and Angostura bitters (the recipe technically calls for black walnut bitters and celery bitters, but I don’t have either) and garnish with apples and grapes. When poured into a chilled martini glass, the smell of this is enough to drive my family from the room. If your drains smelled this way you would call a plumber. I didn’t need a new reason to never eat a Waldorf salad again, but I have one now.
One Chinese internet user on Weibo, China’s heavily censored equivalent of Twitter, complained about the pungent smell.
Microalgae "superfood" supplements like spirulina and chlorella have been a fixture of the wellness scene for decades. But with a bitter, grassy or fishy flavor, the single-celled organisms have remained niche, reserved mostly for those willing to overlook their pungent aromas in pursuit of health.
There is some data that “retraining” the brain to identify smell and taste can help, with constant exposure to pungent substances such as lemon, eucalyptus and clove.
I will concede that Weenie is not perfect. Like many chihuahuas, she’s rather barky with both other dogs and humans – she especially dislikes men, tall men, tall men in hats, and tall men in hats on bicycles – though because of her size, the usual response to her aggression is “Oh, aren’t you a ferocious beast!” Her breath is so pungent that her yawns smell like farts, prompting us to refer to them as “yarts”. If she’s on one of her beloved car rides and it gets dark, she whimpers as if to tell us we need to turn on the lights so she can better enjoy the scenery.
Located in a grand Victorian commercial building, where leather goods were once made and sold, the Farrell Centre greets the street with a big shop window, set to display objects with a Tyneside link nominated by local people, and an open entrance lobby with a sunken seating area for talks. A jaunty scaffolding reception desk on wheels hints at the provisional nature of proceedings, while bright blue and yellow rubber floors, pink balustrades and green steelwork bring a pungent whiff of the 1980s, when Farrell was in his postmodern prime. Colourful Formica panels continue the theme up a new staircase, which thrusts past raw brick walls, where the original cast-iron fireplaces hang surreally mid-floor.
Garlic, onions and other pungent foods have a way of sticking around after you chop them. To remove the funk, mix baking soda with a little water to make a paste. Rub it on your hands and into your cuticles and other hard-to-reach spots, and then wash as usual to freshen up.
The six tastes of life include: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent. While you're probably most familiar with sweet, sour and bitter tastes, astringent is harder to identify.
My favorite season is spring, with its tender, fragrant early flowers, its pale baby leaves, its scudding clouds in blue skies, its breezes, and then, as summer pops, more pungent and colorful flowers.
Reynolds’s decision to embrace a more approachable cuisine — as opposed to perfectly seared duck breasts and a multicourse tasting menu at Canvas — simplified his job in some ways. “Fine dining has to be thought-provoking, it has to be aesthetically beautiful, it has so many requirements,” Reynolds says. His fried chicken, on the other hand, has just one obligation: “that it be delicious.” The chicken at Crispy Gai is reminiscent of Reynolds’s favored Thai street food, brined in a pungent fish sauce and cilantro marinade before it is fried twice, then garnished with sweet fried shallots.