FLAVOURS
As our mouth deciphers the taste of foods, our nose anticipates the flavour of foods.
The hedonist sensations that flavours trigger and the memories they stir – the sweet, fresh and evocative smell of the air following a rainstorm, the heavenly scent of home-cooked cinnamon rolls on an autumnal night – are the stuff of culinary lore. Flavour is the third and final Foundation principle for your Magical Kitchen.
Unlike Taste Families, there is no universally agreed lexicon for Flavour Families. What one chef or cookery writer calls floral, another might call fruity. A food described as grassy in one magazine might be called verdant in another. This makes things a bit trickier for us home cooks when either creating or reviewing a recipe, but not impossible.
Seasoned home-cooks have something called taste memory. Flavour memory can be acquired similarly, but it takes much more time and effort.
By far the easiest way to test whether your combos will be successful is to type two or three foods into your preferred search engine, and see how many dishes come up. Type in prawns and lemons and an array of recipes will show up. Try prawns and cherries and you will find absolutely nothing.
There are classic Flavour Bases that you can master quickly and which will help you discover which of your Go To and Magical Foods work with each other.
What you want in your kitchen are foods that revolve around your Go To and Magical Foods.
Mother Nature has programmed each food to go with a complementary set of foods based on the ratio of protein, fat, carbs, minerals, water and fibre. This is the starting point.
Flavour Bases bring together regional indigenous foods. In short, foods that were available to the local community (or nation) in a pre-industrial age. Southern European dishes were typically cooked with olive oil, while northern European dishes were cooked with butter. Citrus and stone fruits were more prevalent in the south, while apples and pears dominated the north.
Given all the possible combinations for developing flavourful dishes, one of the reasons for creating a short list of Magical Foods was to make it easier and quicker to work out which of all the other Go-To Foods would go with them. For savoury dishes, you will likely need at least one (and ideally two), foods that align with your main ingredient. For sweet dishes, you might get away with the main ingredient only – using herbs, spices and potions for flavour.
There is no ‘bible’ of Flavour Families, but there are some great books and some excellent ideas for Food Families on the internet.
FLAVOURS Payoffs
Taking savoury foods in different directions. Your culinary repertoire will expand as you try out new (and old) cuisines, choosing dishes that are world-beaters and creating your own dishes based on your understanding of how flavours go together. Also, learning to tweak your pairings and combinations based on dry and moist cooking methods.
Knowing how to use just five ingredients – flour, eggs, milk, cream and sugar – to rustle up desserts, from pillow-y meringues and airy mousses, to silky crème caramels and soft, rich ice creams, enabling you to create contrasting texture-pairings with your savoury dishes.