Anyone who knows me well is aware that I am a HUGE foodie. I literally eat anything and everything. Years ago I made a personal commitment to improve my cooking skills. I got tired of paying $80-100 every time our family of four went out for a decent meal. When restaurants cook a dish, they go off a recipe so the end product is consistent. Sure, some restaurants are using controlled temperatures and super expensive tri-clad pans, but my local Thai restaurant just uses a simple wok on the stove top! When I first dove into cooking, I made plenty of mistakes. It sucked when I would whip together a dish and it simply did not taste good. As I read more and more about how to cook and worked through a great deal of trial and error in the kitchen, I came up with the following truisms that opened my eyes a bit to how dishes are structured and ultimately take on the desired flavor profiles that I had imagined.
START FRESH – There is a notable difference between cooking with ingredients that have been laying around and those that are fresh. Always try to find the freshest ingredients. A great source for fresh ingredients are local farmers markets, targeting vegetables that are in season. There is a point of perfection for most vegetables when they are ripe but not overripe. The way you store them also impacts the flavor. When you buy tomatoes for example, they are not meant to go in the refrigerator. This actually changes the structure of the tomato making it grainier and less flavorful. For a perfect tomato, I leave it on the counter and let it get ripe. The vast majority of the time, tomatoes from the store are not ready to be consumed. They typically need almost a week of “seasoning” before they ripen up, start to wrinkle a bit, and become super juicy and flavorful.
BE PREPARED – The Boy Scouts nailed this one. There is a concept in French cooking known as “Mise en Place”. This basically translates to everything being in its place. Before you fire up the stove top, your ingredients should already be cut up, measured out, and ready to go. I even go so far as lining them up on the counter in the particular order that each ingredient goes into the recipe. If you are making a great sauce and you have onions and garlic caramelizing, you don’t want to risk having them overcook while you take the time to get your bacon or parsley chopped up. This also saves you from the most annoying thing of all, when you start cooking a recipe and suddenly realize one of the ingredients is missing!
MAINTAIN BALANCE – Just like the over-encompassing theme of this website, the top fundamental in creating a delicious dish is balance. There are several flavor profiles that hit your palate when you eat. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, spicy, and ‘umami’ which relates to depth of flavor or how savory it tastes. A perfect dish has a presence of all of these components while none of them is overpowering. Keep in mind that some of these flavors counteract eachother which is how you achieve that ideal balance. I love to finish a sweet dish with a spritz of lemon or lime juice or a splash of vinegar to add sour notes to curb the sweetness and help bring out the flavors in the recipe. If you are cooking a soup or sauce and it is too salty, you can put in a potato and it will absorb the extra salt!
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT – One of my favorite things to do is to think of a dish I would love to be able to cook and then find a number of different recipes for that meal. For example, I was at a Thai restaurant eating Tom Kha soup one day. I love those flavors and thought, how hard could it be? So I went online, found a bunch of recipes, and looked for commonalities – coconut milk, galangal, thai chiles, kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, and lemongrass. Other recipes added in other ingredients including ginger, fish sauce, chicken broth, ginger, palm sugar, or chili oil. So I made a small portion of 4-5 difference versions, slowly added ingredients and TASTED as I went to identify what added flavors I liked or did not like. As I went, I deviated from the recipe and adjusted things to suit my palate and get the best possible balance. I did end up wasting some food in failed attempts, but getting to a final product that I loved was worth every penny!