It seems obvious. I’ve heard it a million times before. But it didn’t sink in until I had seen ignoring this one simple thing sink half a dozen contestants on Top Chef:
Taste, taste, taste.
And its unspoken crucial counterpart: adjust, adjust, adjust! Like a lot of people, I have a habit of just making the food and hoping it turns out the way it’s supposed to. I even sling in spices by the handful without tasting and adjusting along the way.
But I finally got it. Tasting and changing the flavors as I go is the one step that practically guarantees that I’ll go from a good dish to a great one – or a flat, bland dish to one I want to eat over and over again.
It’s not enough to follow a recipe. Especially for me, because I rarely REALLY follow a recipe in the first place. I think I’m following it, but I don’t have parsley so I’m substituting cilantro, and I have all but one of the spices, and I decided I didn’t need walnuts either because I’m not that into them….
And I know I’m not alone, because whenever I hit up a recipe website that allows comments, I see that most of the commenters are doing the same thing. The standard positive comment on any recipe goes something like, “This is an amazing recipe! I just doubled the butter, used a little less cream, oh and I threw in some pork that I had to use up, and used stock instead of water, and served it on top of pasta, with some marinara on top. Incredible!”
Even if you follow a recipe exactly, your tastes may be different, your variety of spinach or rice different, your chicken larger or your pan smaller than those the author intended. The only solution is to taste as we go, using the recipe as a jumping-off point for our own delight.
So how do you take a recipe from ehh to excellent? You need a good balance of low, middle, and high notes. Another way of looking at this is to think of them as earthy (meat, mushrooms, soy sauce), subtle (vegetables, starches), pungent (spices, garlic, citrus), and amplifying (salt, cream, sugar) flavors. In Thai food, dishes are supposed to balance the five flavors of salty, sweet, spicy, sour, and bitter.
A Maui restaurant called Curry in a Hurry writes about the effects of these flavors on our bodies: “The voluptuous sweetness of vanilla custard is diametrically opposed to the bitter bite of lemon peel; one is soothing, the other is a shock. Your whole body reacts to the difference, which begins on your tongue but continues throughout your body.”
My mental shorthand is that a dish isn’t done until my mouth wants to taste it again and again. It has to generate that “mmm!” response.
You don’t necessarily have to include every kind of flavor in a dish to get that response, but I notice that I most often generate it by making sure a dish is properly salted, and sprinkling in some balsamic vinegar or citrus to brighten the flavors. Bitter, savory, and creamy flavors are often in my main ingredients already; if not (or if I need more) there’s always cream, olive oil, soy sauce, Bragg’s amino acids, chili flakes, olives, preserved lemons, and garlic – just for starters.
Apartment Therapy has a lot of good posts about adjusting seasoning, and some good suggestions about playing with taste:
* “Try each raw vegetable before throwing it in the pot so you see how the flavor and texture changes.
* “If you’re making a salad dressing, try it by itself first and then with a few ingredients from your salad.
* “If you’re adding spices to a soup or sauce, taste the sauce after you add each spice to see how it changes.
* “Taste everything at the beginning, middle, and end of cooking to see how things change.”
Now you too can laugh smugly when Tom Colicchio sternly demands, “Did you taste this before you sent it out?” and yet another cheftestant hangs their head and mumbles “No….”
Coming up in the next couple of weeks: a more in-depth look at salting food just right, and how to extract the maximum flavors from food.
Leave a Comment