Flavor Intensity

We were frequently complimented on the flavor intensity of our food., and I’m surprised I have yet to write about this.  As I looked over the blog and my posts-in-progress, I realized that I had begun to write about it, in a post to be called Intelligent Cooking.  But every time summer rolls around, the subject comes to minds again.

“Intelligent cooking” includes looking at a recipe with an eye to coaxing the most flavor from whatever project it is you’re working on.  You’d be surprised how many recipes just throw away flavor along the way to the finished project.

Here’s one example...

Reading cookbooks is one of my favorite pastimes and, occasionally, I’ll adapt a recipe for my own use.  I came across a recipe years ago by a fairly well known chef, which I adapted for a game dish.  It called for soaking dried currants in water, and then discarding the water.  One of the other ingredients in the sauce was cassis, the blackcurrant liqueur from France.  Why, I thought, would you soak the blackcurrants in water, and then throw the water away with whatever flavor it had picked up from the fruit?  Why not soak them in the cassis, and maintain all the flavor?  Simple things like this can make a very perceptible difference in the final product.

A second example is the reason I think of this issue every summer.  We used to do a very simple, very fresh pasta dish every summer.  It called for blanching, peeling, seeding and dicing the most beautiful tomatoes we could find.  Then we sauteed some diced onions, and added the diced tomatoes to warm them through.  Finally, we added some basil chiffonade.  Just before serving, we’d stir in some fresh goat cheese.  The dish would be garnished with additional basil.  It would have been wonderful if that’s all we had done, but we pushed the flavors to incredible by peeling and seeding the tomatoes over a colander to catch the juice.  Then, the juice from dicing the tomatoes was also added.  This relatively thin juice went into a small saucepan, and was slowly reduced to a syrup, which was added to the pasta sauce.  What a difference!  I recall telling a fellow chef for whom I have a lot of respect that this is what we did, and he was shocked--”You do that?  Are you crazy?”  Well, it’s relatively simple, and it makes a huge difference.

So, I would encourage you to look at recipes with a critical eye, and practice intelligent cooking.  It’s one way to vastly improve your cooking.