Learning how to balance flavor is the key to baking and cooking well. And this may sound hard to do. But it isn’t. It just takes time and a bit of knowing what to look for. Someplace to start if you are struggling to understand how to balance flavors is from the cookbook, The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs, written by Andrew Dornenburg (Author) and Karen Page (Author).
The Flavor Bible
This book is an insanely good reference point for cooks of all levels. There is nothing better than having a true base to start with that lets you know how something works. Inside this book are the foundations of cooking with flavors and their pairings.
They have done so by literally researching and studying ways in which flavors are being combined. And interviewing many of the country’s most imaginative chefs and other food and drink experts. Through this, they were able to come up with a compendium of combinations and suggestions of more than 600 modern day compatible flavors.
Inside you will find these interviews that are beautifully written so much so that you cannot stop by reading just one. Each set of interviews is separated into 4 categories of focus. Physical, emotional, mental, and elevation through strategies.
Great Cooking
The next chapter expresses the importance of seasonality and understanding the “essence of the ingredients.” It is extremely important to understand this. I know I talk about cooking by the season a lot. But thats because it is really important to do so. All food has a season in which it grows best.
If you have ever grown anything ever, you would quickly see this. Those tomatoes you see around the grocery store will never taste as good in December as they do in July. Just because an ingredient is available, it does not mean that it should be eaten at that time. Food takes certain conditions to become what it needs to and time of year is a very big part of that.
An example that I love on this subject is in this book. At its core, they say to look at what is served on holidays. and then picture what its like to move around all of those foods to a holiday at the opposite time of year. The food starts to not make sense. Fresh berries at Easter switched with pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving? They won’t taste the same if made fresh.
The 5 senses of taste:
Sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. We all can taste these elements of flavor on a daily basis. Some foods contain a higher concentration of one or the other. The sensations that come from these factors can be pleasing to many but not all.
Take pickles for example. A bread and butter pickle is actually a sweet pickle. However, many people, such as my girlfriend, really do not like vinegar and therefore, will still pickup the high levels of vinegar even through the sugar and other elements. This is because there is only one offsetting element to the vinegar which still places it at the forefront of the flavor profile.
This is not balance. At least not necessarily when you consider all of the elements of balancing food. There are so many factors that come into play. An example I like to use that everyone can understand in balancing many taste factors at the same time, is a tomato sauce.
The Tomato and Flavor
Tomatoes contain a certain natural level of acid and sweetness to start. Now, factor in the many additions that can be put into a red sauce and you start to see the balance.
There is fat from the oil used to start the cooking process. This creates a base to all cooking. It also provides texture as well as a base for all flavors to bind to. Fat loves to bind so as long as the ingredients are higher than the amount of fat used, the fats will allow everything to come together in a beautiful ceremony of flavor.
After this, you start to build your flavors by adding onions and salting them until they start turning translucent. This starts the salt and savory (umami) base. After this, depending on your recipe, you add your tomatoes. With this addition, here comes the acid element.
Tomatoes also contain natural levels of msg or mono sodium glutamate. In that, you are upping the level of savory in the dish. Now we must add some sugar because tomatoes LOVE sugar.
A Side Note on Flavor
A side comment I feel the need to bring up. As a child, my grandma would make up a snack for us consisting only of tomatoes from her garden with a sprinkling of sugar on them. Now I will say, that I have been called out multiple times on this fact while living in the south that I am obviously not from the south. Because if I had been, I would be putting salt on them. But I urge you to try them with sugar. It is delicious.
Back to it
From here, water would be added so that in can cook for an extended period of time and let all of the flavors mesh together in a beautiful marriage. I also add lemons which helps add acidity and bitterness. And you cannot forget the herbs. Here you would add rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley, or any of the classics for a red sauce in any combination. This will combine with all of the other flavors, assisted by the fats, for a beautifully balanced endgame flavor.
This is exactly why I bring up tomato sauce. It provides a view of how all elements of food can come together for perfect balance. There are obviously other things that can do the same thing. But this is the best example I know of to represent a true balance of flavor. Also, it should be mentioned that tomato sauce is one of the five french mother sauces if that gives you an idea as to how important this sauce is to the cooking world.
A real start to learning this sort of information is a book called The Flavor Bible. I recommend this to all new cooks. I have gifted it to many as well. It is an encyclopedic layout of flavors that go together. Simple as that. Check out the link below to get your copy.
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