How To Build Flavor
When you look at a recipe, have you ever felt like there were just too many ingredients or steps? What is the purpose of all of this? Will that actually make a difference? It can sometimes be a little overwhelming.
What if I told you, though, there was a reason for all of these things?
Sure, you can make really great food with just a few simple ingredients. And you can get the recipe steps alllllll wrong and still come out with something that tastes really good.
But many times, those ingredients and steps are so numerous in order to build flavor.
What is flavor?
Many times, we use the word flavor interchangeably with “taste.” These two words are super similar, but what makes them different is the use of the senses.
Taste is 5 basic things that are felt on the tongue: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. These are the basics.
Flavor is more specific. Flavor is the thing you taste coupled with the aromas you smell. This helps the foods you eat have specific flavors. For example: honey and milk chocolate both taste sweet, but because of the aromas, they have very different flavor profiles. Chocolate:
How do you build flavor?
To build flavor, you have to understand these 3 things:
tastes balance each other out
certain foods compliment each other
how to cook things correctly
Balanced Tastes
I’m sure you’ve heard of classic flavor combinations like sweet and sour or salty and sweet. These are classics because the tastes balance each other out in your mouth. You would notice if the balance was off. Like if a Reese’s Take-5 was missing the pretzel inside, you would desperately miss the balance that they salty pretzel brings. This is why a sweet creamer makes bitter coffee more palatable. (Check out my favorite homemade coffee recipe here.)
Complimentary Foods
Aka food pairing. These foods bring that balance in taste that we talked about before, but also their flavor profiles compliment each other. Think about some classic food pairs: peanut butter and chocolate; tomatoes and basil; lobster and chardonnay. (How to Pair Wine & Food) Learning which foods go well together takes time. You have to taste a lot of foods and really think about what the underlying flavors are. You can read more about food pairing here. But to learn how to build flavor in your food, you have to know what foods will compliment your dish and layer those flavors throughout your dish. Like adding onion and garlic to a dish. You don’t always know they are there, but if they were not, you would know. I encourage you to test it sometime.
Correctly-Cooked Foods
The last part that is important to build flavor is knowing how to cook your food correctly. I know that sounds self-explanatory, but let me explain. When you learn how to cook your food correctly, you get more natural flavor out of the products. For example, when you are making green beans, blanching the beans in salted water is the perfect way to get the most out of the bean. You don’t over cook it and get all of the nutrients out (like when the water is green after cooking them.) and your green beans still have a great fresh flavor and texture.
Another great example is simply cooking a piece of chicken. When I cook chicken for a crowd, I like to sear the outside of the chicken until it gets a nice brown exterior then pop it in the oven to finish cooking. This adds flavor by browning the outside, but not over cooking the chicken in the pan. When you put it in the oven, the chicken gets the chance to cook all the way through, but remains juicy, which is that natural flavor from the chicken, as well as keeping a nice moist texture. Check out my 5 Dinners You Can Make In 30 Minutes Recipe Guide to get the recipe.
So, keep this in mind next time you cook something: your recipe has all those steps to help you build the best flavor and for your dish to turn out the best it can!
