UNDERSTANDING YOUR PALATE

For years, scientists have told us that we detect four tastes on different parts of our tongue: salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. More recently, however, taste experts have discredited the notion that certain regions of our tongue are exclusively devoted to a single taste sensation.

These days, the experts are zeroing in on the subject of volatility, or how certain ingredients come alive, or awaken, in the presence of others. There is much research yet to be done in the field of the volatility of flavors, but what’s been discovered thus far has significant implications for cooks.

VOLATILIZING FLAVORS

When you swirl a glass of wine, you’re allowing the esters in the wine to mix with air, making the components in the wine more noticeable to your nose and, in turn, to your palate. Similarly, a splash of water added to a glass of scotch brings out new components in the scotch by releasing some of the flavors that were “trapped” in the liquor. How does this relate to cooking?

While air and water awaken the flavors in wine and scotch, respectively, fat and alcohol play a similar role in cooking. The nose acts as a chimney to aerate what’s on the tongue, allowing us to identify foods beyond the sweet, salty, sour, or bitter flavors that the tongue can detect. When more of a food’s flavors are awakened, the food tastes more complex.

Across the world, cooks have known this for centuries. Indian cooks awaken flavors by frying spices in ghee, a type of clarified butter, before adding braising liquid to a curry. Likewise, Thai cooks melt fat-rich coconut milk solids to sauté curry paste before adding the remaining watery part of the coconut milk. In both examples, the flavor and aroma of the spices are enhanced when the spices are volatilized in fat, more so than if the spices were simply added to the liquid in either recipe. If you’ve ever noticed a difference in flavor between a soup made from just dumping a bunch of vegetables into a pot with some stock and a soup made from roasted, caramelized vegetables, you understand how fat can awaken and carry flavors.

THE ROLE OF ACID IN COOKING

Alcohol, when used in cooking in the form of wine, also volatilizes flavors, adding exponential complexity when it’s used as a deglazing ingredient to coax flavorful caramelized bits of food off the bottom of a pan. Wine further enhances complexity by introducing acid. Acid has almost incredible control over our salivary glands—it causes us to salivate. On a most rudimentary level, this makes a case for serving wine with food. Cooking with acid ingredients such as tomatoes, citrus, and vinegars introduces a powerful dynamic. Try seasoning a pot of freshly puréed black bean soup with a splash of vinegar and you’ll see what I mean.

UMAMI

In addition to the four fundamental tastes of bitter, salty, sweet, and sour, a fifth taste, the sensation of savoriness, known as umami (pronounced ooh-mah-mee), has rapidly been gaining recognition and acceptance among scientists and fine cooks around the world.

In 1907, a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda coined the word umami (based on umai, Japanese for “delicious” or “tasty”) to describe the distinctive meatiness or brothiness he discerned in certain foods. He managed to extract the essence of umami from kombu seaweed, which he found had a remarkable ability to balance and enhance flavors when added to a soup. Professor Ikeda determined that umami comes from glutamates, which are naturally present in many common foods. (You may be familiar with Dr. Ikeda’s related, more notorious contribution to the food world: Ac’cent, or monosodium glutamate.)

Ingredients as diverse as cooked mushrooms, certain aged cheeses, fermented soy sauce (not all soy sauces are fermented), meats, asparagus, anchovies, Asian fish sauce (which is made from fermented anchovies), olives, and bottled clam juice are all naturally rich in umami. When a melon, tomato, or ear of corn is perfectly ripe and full of flavor, it’s said to be high in umami. A Caesar salad packs a double punch of umami thanks to anchovies and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

If you have trouble recognizing or identifying umami, try to recall a bland vegan dish you might have been served at one time. Without a baseline sensation of savoriness, or umami, which otherwise might be contributed by animal fat, vegan recipes can seem one-dimensional in flavor. To get rid of the blahs and make the dish more “tasty,” you only have to go as far as your pantry. There you’re likely to find an arsenal of umami-rich glutamates ready to come to the rescue. For example, the flat vegan dish could be punched up with any of these umami-rich vegan ingredients: cooked potatoes, nori (dried seaweed used in sushi), aged balsamic vinegar, sautéed shiitake mushrooms, grapefruit, or green tea. In addition, omnivores will find plenty of umami in dry-aged steaks, scallops, lobsters, clams, and in such cheeses as Danish blue, Gruyère, Roquefort, and Parmigiano-Reggiano.

There’s a final bit of good news about umami: Not only does it add remarkable depth of flavor and complexity to cooking, it also contributes to our sense of satiety, or satisfaction. Umami rules!

HOW FATS ENHANCE FLAVOR

When I was dean at the California Culinary Academy, my husband and I were fortunate to be invited for dinner one night to the home of our Introduction to Wines instructor, Steve Eliot. As we sat relaxing over wine and nibbles before dinner, every so often one of us couldn’t resist remarking on the seductive fragrances wafting over from the stove. After a while, Steve pushed his chair back, cocked his head toward the stove, and announced, “It’s time for me to start throwing butter into things.” I winked, knowing full well what he was up to. I was certainly well aware that Steve knew plenty about wines, but now I was confident that the guy could cook, too. I suspected we were in for a treat. The first taste of his pork and chanterelles braised in Chardonnay confirmed my suspicions. What made Steve’s food taste so fine?

One of the time-honored French flavor enhancement secrets you learn in cooking school is a classical technique called monter au beurre (pronounced mohn-tay oh burr), literally “to mount with butter.” As a finishing step, after a sauce, soup, or stew has cooked and reduced sufficiently, the cook swirls in a nugget of unsalted butter, enriching the sauce by emulsifying all the ingredients, binding them to the fat molecules in the butter. If you’ve ever marveled at the distinctive gloss and rich mouth-feel of French sauces, this is how they do it. It’s a great trick to have up your sleeve if the stock you used was a bit bland, the vegetables in your puréed soup weren’t at their peak of flavor, or you want to limit the addition of any fat to the most critical point in a recipe’s preparation. Likewise, a judicious drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil over a bowl of braised cannellini beans or a crème fraiche garnish on a soup can provide not only the eye appeal, but the same “finished” quality you’d achieve with a skillful monter au beurre.

This last-minute gilding with butter—or your fat of choice—also provides exponential dividends when the food hits your tongue. While the tongue does a good job of detecting salt, sweet, bitter, and sour, when coated with fat, the tongue becomes a hypersensitive flavor receptor. As the fat molecules coat your tongue, the chimney that is your nose aerates your mouth, and the fat distributes the flavors all across the surface of your tongue, not just where your spoon deposited them. The old cooking-school adage, “Fat is flavor,” can be extended. In fact, fat also magnifies flavor.

THE CHALLENGE OF LOW-FAT COOKING

Herein lies the inherent challenge in low-fat cooking. Without the tongue-coating benefits of fatty ingredients, the cook has to rely on bursts of flavor from the raw ingredients themselves. If you’re used to deriving a sense of satiety, or fullness, from fat-rich foods, you have to find other stimuli for satisfaction. What a case for cooking with the seasons, when fresh foods are at their peak.

By Linda Carucci in "Cooking School Secrets for Real World Cooks", second edition, Author House, USA, 2016, excerpts pp. 46-48. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.