FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The verb to cook implies that something is happening; changes are taking place that create a variety of results. To understand where you want to end up, you must first understand how to get there. As you work with food you learn how it changes; and to really learn you need to work with all of your senses. You see, smell, touch, taste and even listen to the food. You are after something specific here-that very special will-o'-the-wisp known as flavor.
How is flavor perceived? Certainly the sense of smell is key. Webster's says that we discern flavors by the sense of taste, and goes on to describe taste this way: "The sense that is stimulated by contact of a substance with the taste buds on the surface of the tongue and is capable of distinguishing between sweet, sour, salt, and bitter."
Sweet, sour, salt, and bitter are, in a way, the compass points of taste: the North, South, East, and West, if you will. When you cook, you make decisions about which direction you wish to travel in. The further in any one direction you go, however, the les balanced your food will be. But that's not always bad-who would want salty ice cream
While teaching myself about wine, I learned another analogy that helps me understan the balance in flavors; when you study the flavor of wine, you find that you can apply the same technique to food. When people speak of wine, they often refer to its structure. This idea mystified me until I thought of structure in terms of the human body. The most easily accessible qualities in wine are the fruity and acidic flavors of the grape; so i you imagine the rich fruit as the flesh of man, and the acid as the bone structure, you can easily see their interdependence on one another. Too much richness and you have a heavy, flabby dish; too much acid, and it is brittle and hard. We must balance the structure of flavor by being aware when we cook; analyze your food continuously and taste it for the direction it has taken relative to where you want it to go.
Marcella Hazan, in her brilliant way, has summed it up quite well. She tells us that Italians use the word insaporire to describe the process of making something tasty. She goes on to describe the method for making a sauce where finely diced vegetables are sautee until they are glazed and imbued with flavor before the next step is taken. If you are making a cream sauce, for instance, I would normally advise you to cook the vegetables in butte (the flesh), then add wine or vinegar (the bones), and finish with cream and seasoning (more flesh). With only butter or cream your sauce would be fat and heavy, but the addition of vinegar helps add structure to your sauce, the way your spine adds structure to your body. This knowledge will help you obtain rounded, layered flavors that will move across the palate in waves.
Rather than give you dozens of specific examples of this "body analogy," I am offering the following chart which will serve as a kind of shorthand. Your own imagination can do the rest!
The Body Analogy
| Butter Cream Ой = Flesh |
Wine Vinegar Citrus = Bones |
Meat Stock Glaze = Muscle Vegetables pkes = Soul/Personality Fruit/Sugar |