Teaching to a Particular Sweet Spot
The TASTE Flavor Lab Summer Solstice Offer Approaches
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Flavor Creation: It’s Who We Are
Life is a distillation - a reduction to use a food metaphor - that hones our interests and clarifies our capabilities.
Life is enriched in places of deep authenticity.
I believe in writing and teaching as service to others. Writing in ways that inspire readers to look closely at the simple food riches everywhere around. Teaching in ways that elevate our understanding of how those riches add to the enjoyment of life.
The TASTE Flavor Lab’s focus is a particular sweet spot. We teach flavor development. The Lab showcases light proteins: poultry, fish, seafood, selective riches of the Pacific Northwest. It also showcases superbly simple, deeply flavored desserts and confections and accoutrements that enliven dishes as contrasts or complements.
The TASTE Flavor Lab will create recipe collections for your easy reference. In every case, we teach the process of flavor development that professional chefs use, made simple for our readers.
One tool restaurant chefs use to challenge themselves in creating new dishes is a book called The Flavor Bible, published in 2008. The authors, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, encourage readers to think of cooking as a way of being in the world, not just as the task of doing. It’s a way of bringing a more intuitive approach to the cooking world. “Cooking offers the opportunity to be immersed in one’s senses and in the moment…”, they declare.
This philosophy is exactly how I approach each cooking project, savory or sweet. A bit of knowledge seasoned with intuition, further enhanced by moments of creativity and curiosity. These are skills we all have.
The Flavor Bible is reminds us that cooking is a marker of time and place: perhaps a vegetarian dish with the first young vegetables of the season, or a richly flavored fruit tart using the best local fruit available, or an eyes-closed set of tastes in a family legacy recipe that you’ve lovingly updated.
Cooking celebrates the physical (the best quality available), the emotional (often tied to a specific culture) and the spiritual (a way of honoring the family).
Vitaly (Vito) Paley, founder of the former Paley’s Place in Portland, Oregon, was quoted as saying, “Find the best ingredients possible and listen to what they tell you about how they want to be prepared. Mess with them as little as you can. Keep their integrity, but at the same time, focus their flavor, which is where creativity comes in.”
Imagining the visioning and experimentation that go into growing or producing an ingredient is the place to start. As your faith in your own judgment of quality ingredients grows, you’ll find your own cooking becoming bright and dynamic.
How do I make food taste great?
Understand the essence of the meal. What is the occasion, the time of year, the available preparation time, the ingredient budget?
Understand the essence of each ingredient. What ingredients are in season? What are that ingredient’s flavor affinities? How will they function in your meal?
What is your primary desire? What is the essence of your meal or event? Is it to showcase an ingredient, a dish, or a cultural legacy recipe?
The Flavor Bible tells us that “the primary aspects of any ingredient’s essence include it seasonality, its taste, its volume, its function, its regionality, its weight and its flavor affinities.”
Karen Page’s book, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible, was published in 2014. The book stories Karen’s own evolution into eating healthier at home, which led to implementing her own vegetarian diet. The author interviews the best vegetarian and vegan restaurant chefs in the country. Both Karen and her husband, Andrew Dornenburg, realized that, not only did not they miss meat in their diets, but they were pleased with all the new flavors and ingredient pairings.
A Flavor Lab Secret: Essential Oils!
The TASTE Flavor Lab will be introducing increasing numbers of recipes that include the use of flavor essences, or essential oils.
Because scent is, by far, the dominant factor (when coupled with taste) in creating flavor, maximizing beautiful aromatics is a major focus for us.
High-quality essential oils are available from many reputable manufacturers at low cost. We use only a few drops!
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially recognized a set of food additives like spices and natural flavorings, preservatives, nutritional additives, enzymes and emulsifiers in the Food Additives Amendment of 1958. They assembled a list of “generally recognized as safe”, or GRAS substances including essences, oils and flavorings consumers and manufacturers could have confidence using for cooking and food manufacture. The list is constantly updated.
Here’s a sample of the FDA GRAS list:
Using GRAS essential oils will elevate your cooking. Examples:
Spearmint Oil-Infused Asparagus Soup
Lime Essential Oil Vinaigrette
Tarragon Oil-Infused Vinaigrette for Vegetables or Butter Sauce
Sweet Orange Oil or Orange Flower Water (called a hydrosol) - Infused Custard
Bittersweet Chocolate Coffee Sauce with Cinnamon or Ginger or Spearmint Essential Oil
Taste + Aromatics = Flavor
Paid-Subscriber Benefits Increase
A chef constantly fine-tunes her best dishes to more deeply satisfy the drive humans have for pleasure. That involves an understanding of how the ingredients used in the dish perform.
A food writer constantly clarifies her thinking about how to help readers sink more fully into the glorious experience of eating and cooking.
Being a chef and food writer is my job.
As a reminder…
TASTE | Pacific Northwest will begin using a paywall on paid subscriber posts on June 20. Between now and then, we’re offering a 50% discount for 1 year, paid annually - that’s $25 for an entire year, grandfathered in forever. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade to a paid subscription, now is the time!
Paid subscribers make this work possible and receive special tools and resources as a thank-you. Upgrade if you’re able. Or consider buying me a bunch of spring veggies or making a donation on Ko-fi.com.
Special TASTE Solstice Offer
You can also choose to forward this offer to others who might benefit. Here is a shareable link for 50% off. Use it yourself, or forward it to others:
https://lnaylor.substack.com/f7e664c2
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