Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (59 page)

MAKES 2½ TO 3½ CUPS

A good salsa is always appreciated—as an appetizer with chips, atop a freshly grilled piece of fish, or inside the tortilla wrap of your creation. This recipe is easy enough that you can commit it to memory. It’s also flexible enough that you can use just about any juicy fresh fruit or vegetable. It calls for cilantro, which swings both south (Mexico) and east (Thai, Vietnamese), so it can fit with a variety of ethnic cuisines.

YOU WILL NEED

2 to 3 cups coarsely chopped juicy fresh fruit or vegetable

About a handful coarsely chopped fresh cilantro leaves

Salt

Diced red onion, about one-quarter to one-half a large onion

Seasoned rice vinegar or freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice

Asian fish sauce (Thai nam pla or Vietnamese nuoc mam)

Sugar

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine the fruit or vegetable with the cilantro in a stainless-steel bowl.

2. Add a sprinkling of salt and taste.

3. Add the onion and taste.

4. Add the seasoned rice vinegar (or citrus juice) and taste.

5. Add a dash of fish sauce and taste.

6. Add a dash of sugar and taste.

7. Which of the Basic Tastes does it need more of? If something stands out aggressively, such as sour, it probably needs to be balanced back in line with something else, such as salt, umami, or sweetness.

8. Allow flavors to marry, about 1 hour, before serving. This is very hard for someone like me (lacking patience) to do, but the salsa is much better when you give it some time.

9. Before serving, taste it again and adjust the seasoning.

HINT

My favorite fruits and vegetables for this recipe:

Tomatoes

Peaches

Nectarines

Plums

Pineapple

Cucumber (peeled and seeded)

Watermelon (seedless)

Mango

Cantaloupe or honeydew melon

SERVES 2

YOU WILL NEED

12 fresh Roma tomatoes, cored and quartered, seeds and pulp removed and discarded so only the firm flesh remains

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

2 celery ribs, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

3 T vegetable oil with a mild flavor such as canola or soybean

½ cup milk

2 Tablespoons unsalted butter

Basic Taste Ingredients:

• ½ fresh lemon or lime, cut into wedges, seeds removed

• granulated sugar

• spice blend made from 2 teaspoons smoked paprika + ½ teaspoon ground chipotle chile powder

• salt

• naturally brewed soy sauce

1 large sauce pan with lid

1 blender (regular or immersion)

DIRECTIONS

1. Sauté the onion, celery, and garlic over medium-low heat in 3 tablespoons of oil until soft and translucent but not browned, about 5 to 6 minutes, stirring occasionally to avoid browning.

2. Add the tomatoes and cook 5 minutes, covered, stirring occasionally, then another 5 minutes uncovered.

3. Add 2 cups water, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook, uncovered, until all ingredients are very soft, about 10 to 12 minutes.

4. If using an immersion blender, keep the soup on a low simmer while you puree it until smooth. If using a regular blender, puree the soup until it’s smooth, return it to the pot, and keep on a low simmer.
²⁴

5. Now, you’re ready to season the soup.

Season

The objective of this exercise is to understand how the Basic Tastes change the flavor of a soup. Do not measure the ingredients as you use them. Use your taste buds as a guide. Start with small (tiny!) quantities of each and increase them as you see fit. You can always add more but it’s very hard to correct if you add too much!

• First: taste the soup. It should taste of tomatoes. You should also taste some umami/savory notes from the onion, garlic, and celery. But it will likely be very mild. The flavor of the soup will vary wildly based on the tartness, ripeness, and sweetness (Brix) level of the tomatoes you used.

• Add a small amount of sugar. Stir then taste. Notice how a different character of the tomato flavor comes out.

• Add a small amount of lemon or lime juice. Stir and taste. Notice how the acid brightens the flavor.

• Add a very small amount of the paprika/chipotle blend—especially if you are a wimp when it comes to spicy Irritastes. Stir and taste. You want to taste some smokiness but not too much.

• Add a small amount of the soy sauce—being careful not to add too much. Stir and taste. Notice how the edges are rounded out,
giving the soup a depth and savory umami taste that’s expected in soup.

• Add salt. Stir and taste. Decide whether the soup needs more salt or if you’d rather get more salt from adding more soy sauce, which adds both salt and umami tastes.

• Continue to add the Basic Taste ingredients one at a time, tasting between each one. Use your judgment as to how much it needs of each. Your goal is to make the soup taste delicious, balanced, and complex, where no one single flavor jumps out at you. If it tastes thin or lacking, keep adding!

• When the soup is balanced, add the milk and butter. Stir and taste. Go through the seasoning exercise again, one Basic Taste at a time, tasting between them. Let your taste buds be the judge. Again, if it tastes thin or lacking, keep adding Basic Tastes!

• When the soup tastes
just about right,
you are finished.

SERVES 2 TO 3

YOU WILL NEED

Pasta, about half a package (I like linguine. Roger likes farfalle. Any shape will do!)

Fresh lemons, about 3 or 4

Aged cheese, preferably a year or older, such as Parmesan, Asiago, aged Gouda, Piave, Grana Padano, about 1 cup finely shredded

Very fresh, very green extra virgin olive oil (or unsalted butter but I like the vegetal notes of the oil)

1 head of frisee, chopped as you would chop an herb for garnish
²⁵

Salt

Sugar

Cracked black pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Cook pasta according to package directions but instead of salting the water, add 2 tablespoons of sugar to the water. This adds a nice sweet counterpoint to the dish, which gets saltiness from the cheese, plus any salt you will add.

2. While the pasta is cooking, shred the cheese using the finest hole on the grater.

3. Squeeze the lemons and set the juice aside.

4. Drain pasta well. While pasta is still hot, put it in a large bowl and toss it with a liberal amount of olive oil. Taste.

5. Sprinkle the cheese onto the pasta while tossing it. Taste.

6. Sprinkle lemon juice onto the pasta while tossing it. Taste.

7. Add a liberal amount of cracked black pepper and salt. Taste.

8. Adjust the flavor with more acid (lemons), umami (cheese), or salt. Use sugar if you need another counterpoint.

9. Serve with more cracked black pepper, cheese, and a fresh garnish of chopped frisee, which adds a fresh vegetal and bitter note.

O
de to Joy, which concludes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, is one of the most famous pieces of music in the world. If you can’t conjure up the melody, or if you just want to add another sensory element to your reading of this book, you can go to
www.tastewhatyouremissing.com
and listen to the most famous bars of it. The entire symphony runs about 65 minutes from start to finish, give or take a few minutes, depending on who is doing the conducting. I’m sure that’s too long for some people, but for Leif Inge, a Norwegian composer and sound artist, Beethoven’s original masterpiece is about 22 hours and 55 minutes too short. Using digital technology, Inge created his own version. He took the original piece of music and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d it out over 24 hours. His performance art piece,
9 Beet Stretch
, is a full day of Beethoven’s Ninth. That’s exactly how long the performance lasted when Inge brought his event to San Francisco. It was promoted as revealing “acoustic truths you never suspected.”

I spoke with Ryan Junnell, who attended the event. He is a media designer who, at the time he went to hear
9 Beet Stretch
, was very much interested in the concept of slowing things down. He later organized a slow-motion video festival called Slomo Video. Although the San Francisco performance of
9 Beet Stretch
was in 2004, he remembers it vividly. “There was this
huge
sound playing over these
great
speakers. You were surrounded by it,” he recalls:

If you’re familiar with even three or four consecutive notes in that piece you would have been astonished to hear those notes stretched out over thirty seconds or a minute. There was a lot of anticipation. You know what’s coming next because it’s a very familiar piece of music but it may take eight, sixteen, seventeen minutes to get there. So you have this amazing foreplay to your expectation. You’re waiting for it, you’re waiting for it, you’re waiting for it. You can’t believe how long it’s taking to get there. But then you can savor that slope. It just makes that one note that you love so much, so much more amazing.

He could have been describing tantric sex. The practice of Tantrism is most widely known in Western cultures as the pursuit of a spiritual form of sex that isn’t about striving for orgasm. It changes sex from a goal-oriented pursuit into something that’s more about the journey. Sex is considered a sacred act “capable of elevating its participants to a more sublime spiritual plane.” The root
tan
means “stretch” or “extend” in Sanskrit. Junnell’s sensual description of the tantric experience he had at
9 Beet Stretch
got me thinking about how we eat.