Taste basics

Our sense of taste is not very refined. Not as refined as our sense of smell. But mess up the taste of your dish and the flavor is gone. In trying to get the flavor right, one has to start from the taste.

Getting a dish to taste good requires craft, but to ruin it, just make it bitter. Just like we are born liking sweet, we instinctively dislike bitter tastes. Poisonous plants tend to be bitter, so it seems a natural adaptation.

The bitter we must learn to like. Kids don’t go for collard greens, or olives, or coffee. Just like we retract our hand from a flame, our taste buds will forces us into faces or spitting actions with certain tastes. The faces inform our friends not to eat the white from the pomegranate, and the spitting will hopefully save us from a tummy ache. We are hard wired to do this, so it must be basic for our survival. The signals from our taste buds go directly to our brainstem, that primitive part of our brain, before being distributed to other parts. Taste is basic.

Bitter flavors are particularly challenging for a dilettante cook like myself because most aromas come from bitter ingredients. Fry your garlic just right and your dish has that great flavor; do it too long and it goes bitter. The same ingredients that are bitter are often the source of aromas. Bitters also help balance flavors and when used in small quantities can add complexity and depth.

Cooking is a balancing act.

Foodie blog surfing

I must be the last one on the web to have figured this out. But just in case I was next to last: A fun way to surf food blogs is to go to Taste spotting the food related eye candy web site from Jean Aw and friends. Anyone can submit an image for review. If the editors like it, it goes to the front of the queue.

If connections were fast, visual web browsing would be the way to surf.

Homework

Right now I can cook from recipes. That’s a level 3 cook. Some cooks don’t need recipes. They look at the fridge, at the pantry, and thirty minutes later there is something great at the table. How do they do it? Practice, they tell me. Necessary but not sufficient, I discover.

Encyclopedic knowledge is needed in cooking. Should I boil or fry asparagus? How many saffron twigs for two cups of rice? Salt and pepper to taste. How much is that? And then there is all this conflicting information. Transmuting gold seems easier than cooking octopus. Even Joy of Cooking, that time tested oracle seems at loss. So part of my education will consist of reading the non-recipe sections of Joy and also the second edition of McGee’s On food and cooking.

Flavors are even harder to figure out. The science is still in the air, but the craft is even harder. If you are one of those people that was just born being able to pick out ten different aromas in your wine, you would still have to go through a seven year apprenticeship before being a certified member of the Society of Flavor Chemists. I first learned of the flavor industry through Eric Schlosser’s writing on how the fast food industry capitalizes on their knowledge.

Ketchup is a great example of how difficult it is to get flavors right. Heinz dominates the market. Marketing I used to think, until I read the story by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yoker about Jim Wigon and how he is trying (and failing) to create the Grey Poupon of ketchups. Heinz ketchup turns out to be well blended. You don’t taste tomato or vinegar or sugar, but ketchup. All that while striking a note on the five tastes.

As I explore, I hope to report.