Taste
Week 1 of culinary school focused on the fundamentals.
The first week of culinary school was not about knife techniques, or kitchen gear. We don’t even have our uniforms yet.
Instead it was a lecture on the fundamental skill any cook must have. The ability to taste.
Taste, after all, is what we’re all after. The whole point of learning how to cook — the cutting, searing, baking and all the fancy equipment and techniques that go into it — is to develop flavor. And the key to developing flavor is to learn how to taste.
But we’ve forgotten how to taste. Instead of tasting our food as we cook, we instead follow recipes to the letter, only really tasting the meal at the end, which either tastes “good” or “bad” or somewhere in between. We’ve lost faith in our own ability to taste and make decisions. We don’t know how to interpret what we’re tasting, nor understand the levers needed to adjust.
So as a result we’ve become followers, trading understanding and knowledge for paint-by-numbers recipes. From this comes the whole food blog, newsletter, cookbook juggernaut. Do you really need dozens of different recipes for a Caesar dressing? No, you just need one. But food blogs need traffic, so they rewrite and rework basic recipes into hundreds of personalized variations so they can feed more more content into the ad-serving machine.
And then when one of those recipes doesn’t “work” we blame it, not ourselves, with one-star reviews and indigent comments. But even the best developed recipe still requires a cook with the ability to taste to interpret and adjust. The recipe developer doesn’t know what sized pan you’re using, or with what material. S/he doesn’t know how hot your oven or range gets, or what kind of salt you’re using.
These are the levers you need to pull for yourselves. So it’s worth taking the time to learn how to pull them.
The Five Flavors
All ingredients boil down to five simple flavors:
Sweet
Tip of your tongue.
Sugar, honey, certain fruits.
Counteracts bitter and sour flavors and to reduce reaction to spicy foods.
Bitter
Front or back of tongue and/or roof of mouth
Organic: grapefruit, dark greens, beer. Front of tongue
Inorganic: Smoked or burned. Back of tongue
Counteracts sweet and rich (savory) flavors
Sour
Sides of tongue.
Vinegar, citrus (lemon). Source of acid
Counteracts sweet and salty flavors.
Salty
Center and sides of tip of tongue.
Derived primarily from salt
Counteracts sweetness, bitterness, sour. Melds and enhances flavors.
Umami/Savory
Center of tongue.
Soy sauce, mushrooms, MSG, some cheese, seaweed
“But what about spicy?” you ask (I know I did in class). Spicy, it turns out, is not a flavor. It’s not something your taste buds detect, but rather a reaction to pain caused by the chemical composition of the food you’re eating. Spicy just goes along for the ride, carried by one of the five flavors above.
The key to working with these flavors, and have them work together, is balance. Balance is achieved by the interaction between three simple levers…
Balance
Salt. Acid. Fat.
These are the three primary levers to pull to achieve balance in a dish, and it’s not something that any recipe can show you. To achieve balance, you have to taste and trust. Put down the cooking app. Close the book. Grab a spoon/fork, and just taste. Then adjust as needed.
Salt
“More important than any pots or pans you have, or the type of knife you use, is the ability to use salt effectively.”
That’s what chef John told us in class. So it seems as good a place as any to start.
Despite all the bad press about salt, and the need to consume less salt, the fact is the home kitchen is not the place to skimp on salt. (The best way to cut down on salt is to cut out fast food and processed foods). The fact is, most home cooks severely underutilize salt.
Salt has several effects:
Desiccates: Salt draws water out of food (Kosher salt gets its name from the act of koshering meat, which is the act of drawing out blood). That’s not only critical in curing, but also sweating vegetables.
Fermentation: In bread, salt controls yeast, and as such is crucial for baking leavened bread.
Boiling/Freezing: salt makes water more dense, which lowers water’s boiling point and raises its freezing point.
But for our purposes today, salt is critical for enhancing and melding flavors. During cooking, use kosher salt. It has bigger grains, which melts more slowly into food (thus lasting longer), and actually has less sodium than table salt.
For each new round of ingredients added as you cook, add a pinch of salt. How much is too much? As a general rule, figure about 1 tsp of salt for every pound of ingredients. If reducing liquids, wait until reduced before tasting and adding salt (reducing liquid concentrates flavor, so salting first risks overdoing it). But of course the best measurement is to just taste along the way.
Once the dish is done… taste. Then adjust with more salt as needed, using either the same kosher salt you used while cooking, or use finer-grained finishing salts as you like.
A quick note on types of salts:
Mined Salts: Used for Cooking
Kosher Salt
Rock Salt
Harvested Salts: Used for Finishing/Garnish
Sea Salt (finer crystals)
Speciality Salts (pink sale, lava salt, flavored salts, etc)
Acid
How many of you regularly squeeze a little lemon juice over your dish before serving? Probably very few. While home cooks may use less salt than they should, most use almost no acid outside of what’s natively present in the ingredients. Hopefully, that ends now.
Adding acidity to a dish wakes it up. It balances the salt you just added, and allows all the flavors in the dish to just shine a little brighter. Acid also triggers salivation, which makes you want to eat and kick starts the digestive process.
How to know if a dish needs acid? Taste. Does it feel dull or sort of flat? Add acid. Not sure? Add acid anyway and see what happens. Compare. Maybe conduct this testing on your own first rather than stressing over the difference with a dinner party meal.
The primary sources of acid are:
Citrus: (Either the juice or zest of)
Lemon: used about 80% of the time
Lime: good, but its impact fades quickly
Orange: also good, but be careful about imparting too much orange flavor
If using zest, do so at the end of the cooking process.
Vinegars:
Sherry vinegar: the gold standard
White/Red wine vinegar: most common in home kitchens
Apple Cider vinegar: woefully underused
Champagne vinegar
Balsamic vinegar
Rice wine vinegar
Other:
Pickled ingredients
Spices (ie: Sumac)
Tomatoes
Fat
Like salt, there are generally two uses of fat — one for cooking and one for finishing.
For cooking, the main factors to consider are smoke point (or flash point) and flavor. Generally speaking, you want an oil with a higher smoke point and with a neutral flavor. Other factors are viscosity (thickness) and of course price (save the pricey oils for finishing).
Smoke point is arguably the most important factor. Smoke point dictates how hot the oil can get before it smokes and breaks down. Cooking in oil that’s filling the air with smoke results in not only a hazy/stinky kitchen, but bitter or acrid food. No bueno. It can also increase the likelihood of an oil fire. Muey no bueno.
The higher the smoke point, the hotter your pan can get (or the oil can get for frying). This determines what you can and can’t do with it.
Searing/browning food (called the Maillard Reaction) requires a minimum pan temperature of 375 degrees. Animal fats (lard, butter, etc) generally have a smoke point of 350 degrees (chicken and duck fat are a bit hither). Do the math. (Note: clarifying butter — where the butter solids are removed from the fat — raises the smoke point to 400).
Vegetable fats have higher smoke points, as well as a generally more neutral flavor. Neutral oils with the highest smoke point (450 - 500+) include sunflower, safflower, avocado, and certain types of vegetable oil. (The exact temperature can vary based on how the oil is processed, stored, etc). My school uses sunflower oil, as do I.
Using olive oil is a matter of debate. It has a relatively low smoke point (350-400) and has more flavor than a neutral oil. It can get kind of gummy and leave a residue on pans when heated too high. I’ll use it for low-temp sweating of vegetables, but generally save it as a finishing oil instead.
Balancing Process
The process of balancing a dish before serving is pretty straightforward. The steps are (in this order):
Taste
Salt (enhances/melds flavors) -> swap w/ sugar for sweet dishes
Taste again
Acid (brightens food, and balances salt)
Taste again
Fat (balances acid. Emulsifies flavor)
Then repeat. Do so in small increments. You can always add more, but you can’t take away.
The big question then is… how to tell if it’s balanced. When to stop. That’s going to be trial and error. It’s a process of developing and training your palate. Short of taking cooking classes with professional chefs who can taste your food with you and tell you when it’s balanced (ahem) here’s a simple trick…
Pay attention to your face. If you’re tasting and your face is kind of scrunched up in thought, might need more balancing. But if after a taste your face kind of relaxes and you sort of reflexively straighten up a bit, then your body just told you it’s ready.
Now… go try it.