Get More Flavour From Your Ingredients
For once, I’m not actually writing a direct recipe, but this time I thought I’d write some key tips on easy steps that will take your cooking from good to great and squeeze a little extra flavour out of your meals. Through basic understanding of flavour theory and a handful of techniques, I hope this blog post will help you get the most out of your ingredients.
The Nature of Flavour
We are all familiar with the basic flavour groups; sweet, salty, bitter, sour (which is often referred to as acidic), spice, fat and umami. To clear a few common misunderstandings, bitterness broadly comes from plant toxins as a deterrent against being eaten. Think dark chocolate, red wine and black tea. By contrast, sourness are the lively acidic flavours like lemon, rhubarb and vinegars. Some people get these two mixed up so I thought I’d clear this up. In the last 10 years, the virtually unknown flavour group of umami has rocketed into global fame. Umami means savoury tastiness. Fried mushrooms, roasted meats, yeast extract, seaweed and soy sauce. Sweet we’re all far too familiar with, and salty (when done properly) works largely as a flavour enhancer. Saltiness also helps boost umami and enhance sweetness. But more on that later. Lastly, we have spice. Spice refers to the heat of an ingredient. On one end we have things like chili, ginger and mustard that give us a hot sensation. At the other end we have ingredients like menthol or mint that have a cooling effect. Fat, often used in cooking for texture, a heat medium, or enrichment also covers flavours described as creamy. Think of ingredients like cream, butter and olive oil, but also carby ingredients like potato, pasta and polenta which fall into the same profile.
Now we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at what these flavours actually do. They each exert an influence on one another, either balancing or enhancing. An enhancement means a flavour boosts the effects of another. A balancing means it will take the edge off it. Imagine how the sweetness of sugar makes lemon juice much more palatable. This is an example of sweetness balancing acidity, but notice how the lemon juice has also made the sugar far less sickly? Some interactions work both ways, some do not. See the table below for more details on all the interactions between the flavours. (Note, for the sake of simplification, I have put salt and umami in the same category as they often go hand in hand for most cooking applications).
The Nature of Aromatics
Now that we’ve covered flavours, let’s look at the true secret weapon in cooking. Aromatics. Remember the last time you had a cold (or even Long Covid for those of you unlucky enough to catch it) and you lost all ability to taste your food. Well, you didn’t. You actually lost your ability to smell. All you were actually left with were your taste buds! You can test this out the next time you eat a meal or sip your morning coffee. Pinch your nose shut and your coffee will taste like mildly bitter hot water. In fact, this is all you ever taste with your tongue, everything else is thanks to your nose.
Aromatics, also known as volatile compounds, are tiny particles released from food during cooking and chewing that are detected by the sensitive membrane in the back of your nose. If we use roughly 5-6 words to describe flavours, we have over 10,000+ words to describe aromatics. Every food has them, which is what we smell when we’re cooking or fermenting. How do you tell the difference between one sweet, sugary piece of fruit and another? Apples and pears? Or any of the berries? It’s thanks to their aromatic compounds that we can tell them apart. There are a few tricks in cooking that help release more of these volatile compounds and capture them in our food. So without further ado, let’s crack on with the tips.
Heat
It might seem really obvious, but heat is something a lot of people get wrong in cooking. For most ingredients, particularly plants, a gentle heat slowly breaks down the cell structure and releases juices. Sautéed onions are an example of this. For this to work properly, we don’t want a heat that’s hot enough to impart any colour. The result is then that, given enough time, the water released evaporates and leaves behind the naturally sweet sugars from the juice. For larger ingredients, low temperatures are used to make sure the heat has time to travel throughout before burning the outside.
High heat cooking causes caramelization and the Maillard reaction. This is when ingredients begin to colour, ranging from light golden brown to dark, rich blackness. A lot of people think caramelization involves adding sugar to a pan but it actually refers to a heat that’s high enough to cause a chemical reaction in the sugars naturally found in the food. The reaction occurs at temperatures between 105 / 221F to 180C / 360F. But why do we want this? Because, much like light and dark, or music and silence, we experience the greatest taste stimulation through contrast. When we caramelize something we release a little extra sweetness as well as bitterness, extending the profile of the flavours. We also release more volatile compounds which stimulate our sense of smell, contributing to the overall sensation. And as we’ve seen in the diagram on flavour, sweetness and bitterness balance one another, but adding a pinch of salt dampens our ability to taste the bitterness further, whilst enhancing our enjoyment of sweetness (think salted caramel).
Now the Maillard reaction is a little different. It too takes place at high temperatures, but is an interaction between amino acids (broken down proteins) and sugars. Taking place between 140C / 280F and 165C / 330F, most people imagine a seared steak, but this reaction is what takes place when bread develops a crust, biscuits bake, doughnuts fry, marshmallows toast, mushrooms grill, popcorn pops, and the now famous roasting of black garlic. It is responsible for producing the umami flavour in a lot of cooked foods but is also linked with the formation of acrylamide, a carcinogen. Acrylamide only appears in starchy foods like potato and barley, and can be reduced by soaking the ingredients in water before cooking.
So, in understanding the basics of heat application, we must understand how to use both high and low temperatures in our cooking. It might be that an ingredient will release much more flavour is we cook it hot enough to trigger caramelization or the Maillard reaction, but then benefit from a long, steady exposure to a lower temperature to finish cooking (or vise versa). The next time you’re following a recipe, keep an eye on your ingredients and how they’re reacting to the heat you’re applying to them.
Deglaze
Deglazing is a simple and beautiful way to make the most of extra flavour and keep your pans nice and clean whilst cooking. When we fry or roast at high enough temperatures to cause the aforementioned reactions, or cook on a low temperature for long enough to cause considerable evaporation, we end up with sticky residue left in our pans. But there is a lot of flavour to be extracted from this if we catch it before it burns.
The easiest way to lift such flavour back off the pan is to add a liquid whilst the pan is still piping hot. You can add a wine, cider or beer, stock, vinegar, water or soy sauce. They will all bubble up the moment they make contact with the hot surface and these bubbles are what remove the stickiness from the pan. You can also use a spoon or spatula to scrape any particularly stubborn parts off, but for the most part, the liquid should be enough. In the case of a roasting tin, remove it from the oven and take your solid ingredients out. Place the tray over a hob or two and turn them on a medium heat. The tin will quickly return to a high temperature so add your liquid and you should hear a nice hiss as it lifts all the flavour from the tin.
Reduce
Following on from deglazing, a reduction is the technique used to intensify flavour and thicken by evaporating excess water. We use this in sauces and soups, but its an important thing to bare in mind when cooking anything that involves water. Why add a splash of vinegar to your sautéed vegetables before adding tinned tomatoes? Because we can allow the vinegar to reduce down, intensify and sweeten at a higher temperature. Excess water dilutes the flavour compounds in food, so giving it time to evaporate leaves behind more of the tasty stuff. The basics French sauces are often simmered for a minimum of 1 hour to 10 hours. When I’ve made stocks for restaurants, we’ve left them simmering for over 48 hours. It is important not to boil during this process as the excess movement in the sauce or stock will diffuse the impurities and result in a bitterness.
Seasoning
Traditionally thought of as salt and pepper, seasoning also refers to all herbs and spices used to impart flavour and aromatics. However, this is not limited to the cooking process, but refers to the salting and infusing of ingredients during preparation as well. The use of salt and rubs help by drawing out excess water from the food, naturally amplifying the richness and depth of flavour. In this sense, seasoning is more akin to curing, but when applied with herbs and spices through a rub or marinade, this is called an infusion. Through osmosis, the flavours exchange with the food, in some cases, penetrating deeply into the ingredient. The timing of when and how we season food makes a crucial difference to the resulting flavour and texture, and is something worth experimenting with in your kitchen.
Those of you who have read my Kitchen article will be familiar with the name Escoffier, who defines seasonings as follows:
Saline (salt, spiced salts, flavoured salts, soy sauce)
Acidic (vinegar, infused vinegar, citrus)
Hot (peppercorns, paprika, cayenne, curry)
Spice (essential oils like paprika, rosemary, lemon, clove)
When marinating an ingredient, pay careful attention to the levels of salt, spice and acid you use and experiment. These factors will often push an ingredient in different directions (for example, the salt may break down proteins, allowing spice to infuse more deeply, but acid might begin to cook an ingredient, firming it up whilst imparting a lively tang).
Timing
You might think I’m going to talk about carefully timed baking or a close attention to fermented ingredients, but what I actually think is the most important element of great flavour is the timing of your produce. There are two key elements to consider: when was it grown? And when was it picked?
If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to buy tomatoes from a supermarket that have been grown out of season and under artificial conditions, then you might consider tomatoes to taste watery and bland. The same goes for anything grown in such a way. Plants have evolved over millions of years to grow during certain conditions, be that the heat and light of the season, the presence of certain pests and disease, or the activity of the soil biology during a given season. If you force a plant to grow outside of this window then it will struggle to fight against insufficient conditions, opportunistic pests it has no natural defense against, and a soil biology it doesn’t ‘speak the language of’. This is when farmers start needing to apply pesticides and fertilizer to the land in order to try and force favorable conditions, but the truth is that we end up with food that damages the environment and that we can literally taste the lack of nutrients.
Compare this to a tomato grown in the height of summer and the distinction couldn’t be more apparent. You can eat them like apples. Sweet, juicy, ripe, and so full of flavour it tastes like an entirely different food altogether. So it isn’t just in your best interest for flavour, but eating seasonally is in your best interest for health too. Not all food is grown equally.
The other element of timing is when was it picked? The nutrient density of food quickly reduces the longer it sits around waiting to be eaten. So why wait? When you see ingredients sat in a supermarket that have been shipped here from god knows where, packed full of chemical preservatives to maintain their colour and the illusion of freshness, surely the answer is obvious?
Texture
An often overlooked element of cooking that actually plays a hugely important role in our food choices is texture. In marketing, the word ‘crispy’ has the biggest selling factor of all food descriptions. On the other end of the spectrum, nothing is more off-putting than putting a spoonful of food in our mouths only to discover an unexpected texture. We’re highly sensitive to such a sensation, after all, along with smell, taste, and our chewing mechanic, our ability to detect texture was a matter of survival. If you’ve ever tried to make ice cream and thought it had a crunchy texture, this is because we can detect ice crystals that are 40 microns (1/25th of a mm) big.
For the most part, the texture of our food isn’t as specific as it is in ice cream, but it is an important factor to consider if you’re thinking of cooking something for an extra 10 minutes or not. If so, ask yourself if something will likely begin to turn to mush or perhaps toughen up if overcooked, then take steps to preserve the texture you want.
To Conclude
I hope you have found these points useful. Applying these ideas to your everyday cooking will help unlock extra tastiness from your meals in the most simple and easy way. I’d love to hear if you found it useful or if you managed to put anything into practice.