Cooking for Flavor
The craft of cooking is about techniques, storage + safety, cookware, and tools. Learning about them takes practice, mistakes, and is best if it is learned as an apprentice to a good chef or cook.
The science of cooking is in the gluten formation of baking, causing the Milliard reaction, emulsification of oils and water, temperatures, measurements + weights, fermentation, etc.
The art of cooking is in the use of ingredients like fruits, veggies, herbs, seasonings, and spices in food to make a dish that smells wonderfully enticing, is overwhelmingly tasty, texturally pleasing, and visually stunning.
The magic of herbs + spice is that they can modify our cooking by adding new flavors and aromas to our dishes without adding fat, sodium, or many calories.
Taste the Dishes and Ingredients
Chef Ramsey always says to taste the food you are cooking and serving, to know how good or bad it is. What we see in his reality show is a spoon is whipped out, and a bit of the food is eaten by the Chef or expeditor. If good it is served, if not, returned to be fixed or replaced. But we know more about taste now than chefs of yore.
- Tip #1: Taste is not just located on our tongue. Taste buds are in the roof of our mouths, in our throats, and receptors have also be found in the lining of the intestine. Additionally, glutamate receptors have been identified in the stomach.
So to really taste ingredients requires we use all aspects of our body. For spice, we can add some into warm water, then drink it, swilling it around in the mouth and doing the wine tasting inhale, followed by swallowing to reach all the locations of taste receptors.
- Tip #2: Taste your food several times during its cooking to assess its taste, color, texture, and aroma, as food and its ingredients change while being cooked.
Our own personal senses play a part in cooking so, for instance when I am sick I do not cook. Not because I feel badly, but my senses are off. Most often when I serve a bad dish, everyone asks if I am coming down with something.
- Tip #3: When smelling dishes, ingredients, herbs or spices, start out by taking small, quick sniffs to pull aromas into your nasal cavity. But if you cannot smell, you will not taste the food correctly, if at all.
But also you need to learn how the herbs and spices or veggies and fruits taste in various conditions and among their natural variations. Then you can start to imagine putting flavors together and trying out new cuisines.
- Tip #4: Taste raw and variously cooked veggies, fruits, herbs, spices that you regularly use in your cooking. Know what each brings to the dish you are making. Try the ingredients from different geographical regions to suss out subtle differences.
Life‘s Cooking Adventure
The reason to explore, is that even with recipes you follow diligently, life is full of variations.
I write a recipe for you to follow, but i cannot always document all the places where you and I may have differences. For example, our salt may be different (Kosher Vs table top), our ovens + stoves may have different actual temps (350F is rarely matched in all stoves), this fish or plant has had its own unique history and tastes differently, my ingredient is fresh while yours is older. All these variations affect cooking and even if I have a really good recipe, what you produce may not taste as good.
- Tip #5: It is impossible to follow a cooking recipe and come up with the exact dish the writer intended, due to life’s many and often unexpected variations. Recipes are approximations that provide the roadway, but you drive the vehicle.
Savory + Salty = Yummy
The post I did on Umami can be reviewed if this aspect of food is interesting. Often when we say “savory”, we mean umami, so it is critical as a foundational taste. I am a savory person, and find that it is my preferred taste.
Under-salting is the one item chefs complain the most about with home cooks like me. We tend to under-salt our foods, and the flavor of the dishes we cook may suffer for that.
Under-salting was made clear while I was making Tom Kha Gai soup. The main soup broth ingredients are chicken broth, coconut milk, ginger, galangal, lemon grass, lime, and fish sauce. (Just to be complete, it also has sliced mushrooms, white chicken, Thai basil leaves, red Thai chili slices, and some cilantro leaves.)
I made the soup broth and it had been cooking a while, but still tasted like colored water. Eventually the chef came by and directed me to add more of the salty fish sauce. I did, he tasted, and he said “more, more”. Then after a bit of heating and mixing we tasted it again and like a miracle, all of a sudden I tasted the Tom Kha Gai soup flavor I was looking for.
- Tip #6: If a dish does not taste good, the first question to ask is if it is salted enough (through whatever means, salt or sauce).
While this section is mostly about salt, savory can include smokiness, earthiness, ocean flavors, and fermentation.
- Tip #7: Do not forget smokiness as an umami source, that is smoked paprika, smoked bacon, and broiling seasoned bones before making a broth.
Bitter ingredients have saved a dish or two on those occasions when I have accidentally over-salted. I cooked a baked potato with butter and pepper, then added a bit too much salt. To counter the saltines I added steamed broccoli and cheddar cheese (bitters) and combined the ingredients for what turned out to be a good dish.
Sweetness = Chemical Happiness
Unlike many people I know, it is my belief that sweetness is something that can be overdone.
I taste the sweetness in non-fat milk, so when I have a milk-espresso I would never add sugar too. Carrots are very sweet to me, thus I find carrot cake too sweet to eat with a bitter coffee to balance its taste.
I tried several versions of Gayle’s Zucchini loaf before I found how much is the right amount of sugar; the original recipe called for 1C and my recipe calls for 1/3C; the reason is that I find nutmeg and cinnamon sweet too, and my first recipe tasted overly sweet and almost inedible.
I find that when I roast veggies, I need to make sure I do not only do savory or sweet vegetables, but intermix them to make the flavors more interesting.
A good chili has umami from beans + tomatoes, but what makes its flavor so soothing is the addition of sweet corn, sweet potatoes, and/or carrots.
- Tip #8: Know your foods, herbs and spices to equalize savory and sweet for a well balanced meal.
Bitter = A Matured Taste
Bitter is a taste that I like, but in limited quantities. I do like beer, broccoli, cabbage, green tea, cranberries, and cooked spinach; but some other bitter tastes are just too strong for me. In my limited experience, bitter is often not a taste children enjoy unless it is an integrated part of their culture.
From personal experience, Chinese medicinal foods are often bitter (1). The “bitters” of craft cocktails are used to augment the savory flavors in some drinks, which I generally like. But when cooking kale or chard I will often counter the bitter taste of those veggies with a touch of sour, that is lemon juice or zest.
- Tip #9: Learn from the very top chart what taste can be used to cancel another taste, and learn which enhances a taste. These two tips are valuable when creating a new dish, saving one, or modifying a recipe to suit someone’s taste preferences.
Sour = Sour Faces
I like most sour foods, and consume a fair amount of lemons, sauerkraut, vinegars, and kimchi. I also like the sweet-sour tastes of Pink Lady and Granny Smith apples, rhubarb (countered with strawberries),
- Tip #10: Sometimes, right before serving, a bit of acid (citrus) can brighten up a dish. I will do this for Tex-Mex dishes, chili’s with some lime, a squirt of lemon on salmon, etc.
The difference between bitter and sour is difficult for some people. Sciencing writes, The sour taste comes from higher acidic foods such as citrus, which includes lemons or limes. The bitter taste, on the other hand, comes from those foods with stronger, more earthy flavors, such as leafy green vegetables, coffees, teas and spices like turmeric.
- Tip #11: Similar to wine tasting, chew the ingredient, herb or spice you want to taste by drawing in a small amount of air into your mouth to increase the rate at which the aromas go into your nasal cavity.
Studies and reporting in PopularScience suggested that eating sour foods causes the release of serotonin, a compound that can affect many basic bodily functions such as appetite, sleep, memory, mood, and sexual desire. We usually hear about serotonin’s role in the brain, since it’s often associated with feeling happy.
Hot + Spicy = Kepedasan
I like spicy, but am not a thrill seeker, so while I may do jalapeños or Thai Birdseye chilies, I will skip the ghost peppers.
- Tip #12: Fat counters heat, which is why you drink whole milk and not water to calm the pepper burn.
I tend to use the spices and ingredients that are native to the cuisine I am cooking. So I have a few on hand. In fact, right now my pantry and fridge is filled with several jars of hot or spicy dried ingredients and sauces.
There is Sriracha, a bottle of Tex-Mex Cholula, Tunisia’s Harrisa, Korean Gochujang, Thai dried red peppers, Japanese wasabi, German horseradish, French Guiana‘s cayenne, French Dijon, Central Mexico’s sweet paprika, and also Hungarian smokey paprika, etc.
- Tip #13: If cooking international foods, try to duplicate the tastes before you start exploring any changes. Being taught from someone native to that land or country is the best way to learn. Cooking is not just following recipes alone in your kitchen, but is really a way to honor distant lands, its people, and its history, by understanding the role of its food in culture.
But heat-spice activates not just the taste buds or receptors I have already named. The complex chemicals also activate the Trigeminal nerve to help identify the physicality of spices.
- Tip #14: The trigeminal nerve is triggered by the “burn of cayenne”, the ”cool of mint”, and the ”sting of alcohols”. These sensations are sent via nerve endings just under the skin in the the mouth and nasal cavities to the brain via the trigeminal nerve.
My Hybrid Family
One of the many things I have learned in this food journey, that I started in Spring 2017, is that not everyone around me (friends and family) are willing to explore the worlds of flavor and cuisines as much as I am.
- I love many European, American, Asian, and Southeast Asian foods, having lived in these regions of the world for many years. The number of countries with different languages, cultures, and cuisines is so vast, that it is hard not to travel a day or so and be in a place completely different from where you started. So this means I was introduced to a variety of cuisines during formative years; different uses of ingredients, textures, spices, herbs, and ways of eating. I learned to enjoy culinary diversity.
- My spouse’s family was a typical white, middle-class American family that kept to its own cuisine (Tex Mex, Southern, and Americanized-European food) so that the children’s palates, growing up was more homogenous in its uses of herbs, spices, and ingredients. Whether in one state, or another, they could recognize the food and drinks they were ordering. They learned to enjoy culinary homogeneity.
Now this high-level, slightly exaggerated comparison is not meant to imply my family’s experience was better than my spouse’s family. Both of our families have their goodness, foibles, and effects on us as adults. But it is intended to recognize and acknowledge that our individual life’s experiences plays a key part in the foods, spices, herbs, textures, aromas, and flavors we each enjoy.
I hope that this helps those you who are starting to play around with herbs, spices, and various ingredients to find a favorable combination that works for you.
—Patty
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