- “It’s actually the nose that serves as laboratory, as much for the chef as for the perfumer. That’s why experienced cooks spend as much time smelling as they do tasting. The mingled scent of ingredients describes to the imagination how they might fit together before we actually combine them.”
- “Cooking is a creative process, and as with other creative pursuits— music, art, writing— there are concepts and tools that can help guide you. Rather than leaving you a set of too-large or too-small or not-in-the-direction-I-wanted-to-go footprints, we wanted to equip you to blaze your own trail. We aim to teach you to become a creative, confident cook who knows how to think about and respond to the ingredients available to you in ways that result in delicious, memorable food.”
- “The most important thing you can do in the kitchen is to trust your senses, which is hard to do when you’re trusting a book instead. And once you develop the awareness and confidence to begin to think and cook that way— turning first and foremost to your senses— you can continue on that path.”
- “Taoist theories dictated that foods should achieve a balance between yin and yang. Yin is cool, dark, moist, and associated with the feminine; hence yin foods— green vegetables and creatures that live in the water— are considered cooling. Yang is hot, bright, dry, and associated with the masculine, and yang foods— fatty and spicy and piping-hot foods, for example— are considered heating.”
- “The only way one can really know things— that is, from the very inside of one’s being— is through a process of self-discovery. To know things you have to grow into them, and let them grow in you, so that they become a part of who you are. The mere provision of information holds no guarantee of knowledge, let alone of understanding. It is, in short, by watching, listening and feeling— by paying attention to what the world has to tell us— that we learn. . . . The geologist studies with rocks as well as professors; he learns from them, and they tell him things. So too the botanist with plants and the ornithologist with birds.”
- “We like to think of ingredients as the most basic building blocks in cooking. They are, in the sense that they are irreducible, but they contain multitudes. The flavor of even the simplest ingredient is multidimensional because it’s the combined effect of the unique bouquet of volatile compounds the ingredient contains. These vary infinitely in their nature and proportion. As Harold McGee, the unparalleled writer on the science of food, puts it, “With natural materials of almost any kind, both the specific volatiles and the proportions can vary due to the genetics of the plant, growing conditions, harvest time, and post-harvest handling.” Any given apple contains more than three hundred separate volatile compounds identifiable through gas chromatography. As we’ll explore, paying attention not just to the dominant taste of each ingredient but also to its nuances is the key to creating great flavor.”
- Character: character generally describes our first impression of something. These impressions tend not to be deep attributes. Impression in food could mean the same thing: light, surprising, fresh, green, salty, sour, warm.
- Shape: Perfumers used shape words to describes scents. They allowed us to think of shape imaginatively, to think about how it will become part of the ensemble: balanced, point, flat, full-bodies, point, soft, thin.
- Texture: chewy, silky, smooth, creamy, coarsy. Consomme will feel light and fresh, quickly disappearing on the palate, while puree lingers on the tongue.
- Intensity: describes how strong of a flavor we associate to a substance. 1-2: rice and potatoes. 3-4 most vegetables. 5-7: herbs and citrus. 7-10: spices, fish saud and soy sauce.
use intense ingredients sparsley. - Naming facets of a food item helps you make decisions about what to use when cooking. For example, while either sugar or honey adds sweetness, they are very different: Sugar is one-dimensional in that it adds just flat sweetness. Honey adds sweetness, color, texture
- How does the character, texture, shape and intensity help make cooking decisions? take for example butter squash: its general character is sweet and vegetal, with a flatness and undertones of earthiness. When cooked, it has densly creamy texture. Now, you could add to it an ingredient of an angular shape – ginger. Ginger will give the squash dimension and make it more exciting. it is intense so only a little is needed. You can add a little bit of fat to make it silky. You could also complement the vegetal, flat, earthy taste of squash with an ingredient that has an uplifting, rounder sweetness to work with and give dimension to that aspect: beets. Lime zest goes well with ginger: funky distinctive cilantro
- “Cold foods register as sweeter than warm foods, but not because the proportion of sugar is actually higher; it’s because the perception of salt diminishes more quickly than the perception of sweetness as the temperature of the ingredients drops.”
- “Spices added before cooking have a very different effect from that of spices added afterward. Try a bit of roasted carrot before sprinkling the curry at the end, to see how the carrot and curry flavor have melded. The fresh addition wakes up what have become deeper, more latent flavors, and also brings a bit of heat.”
- “Because food is so closely linked to what we feel and remember, it’s easy to confuse what is familiar with what is good. To think originally about flavor, we have to learn to approach it fresh. The sensibility and vocabulary we’ve begun to develop for ingredients themselves points the way toward how to think about combining them.”
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