Today we
talked about flavors with Barry. I loved the morning class and wished that it
could have continued into the afternoon. We received charts and colored
diagrams to help understand the 5 different tastes that we could experience.
With that came a series of experiments to show the nuances of how we taste and
the differences that can be made. I feel like that will be especially useful in
the Senses class that I am going to take in the spring. I also loved the citrus
experiment which showed that salt, not sugar would cut the sourness of the
citrus and make it palatable. Who knew that all those mornings I was going it
wrong?
And then
the afternoon struck. Barry wanted us to use limited ingredients and create dishes
with 3 ingredients to highlight the flavors that we had in our pocket. I
panicked. All I could think about was how inexperienced I was and thinking of
recipes that I had already been taught to fall back on. I would never think of
three. Sure, I could pull from the soup class and make potato leek soup which
everyone else was taught and would be a complete cop out despite the fact that
it had 2 not 3 ingredients. Not going to happen. Then I decided to do something
that I knew, something I knew worked and change it just enough to pass. I know,
not my most shining intellectual thought but I was panicking.
I first
settled on beets. I am a new beet convert and quickly decided to roast them
with an herbed goat cheese. Easy. I was going to stack it and call it a day.
Kind of. Barry taught me a new roasting method that I really liked which was
roast them with the skins on in a little water so they did not dry out or leach
flavor. We also decided together that I could do a napoleon style beet and goat
cheese to make it more sturdy. Thankfully tomorrow is vegetable day and I will
learn how to properly roast a vegetable because mine was a little underdone.
Next was
the Brussels sprout salad which I sweetened with a little apple. I paired it
with a apple pure (which needed a ton of help) and scallops that I really
didn’t do. I kind of felt like the whole dish was a cop out. But I finished
it!!!
I am proud of getting it done and plated reasonably well.
I need to work on… I need to be more mindful about the final
product. I have a few skill under my belt but before I would cook how I knew
and try to problem solve the final product to achieve something ok. My end
result was purposely vague because I would hate for it to fall short in some
capacity. In a home kitchen, that is totally ok. You want to feed yourself and
want to make it as palatable as possible by problem solving to the best of your
ability to make it work. In a system where you want to streamline a process,
change a result, or make something entity new you really have to make a
conscious effort to think of the final result first. That is going to take some
getting used to.
Take a ways
·
There are just so many things I can do with
flavor. I love that I can use the flavor wheel much like a color wheel to see
what I need and how to get there.
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