The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (12 page)

Add the cooked pasta, at least a couple of pinches of coarse salt, and plenty of freshly ground black pepper to the zucchini. Cook for a couple of minutes, until the pasta softens. If using caramelized onions, stir them in along with the pasta. After removing the skillet from the heat, taste again to see if the dish needs salt or pepper before serving.

 

 

Caramelized onions are an easy way to add a lot of flavor to a dish. I make a big batch and freeze it in 1-cup portions. A large ten-ounce onion cooks down to about a half cup, or five ounces, of caramelized onion.
Basic technique:
Thinly slice 2 onions. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to a large heavy-bottomed skillet over medium-high heat. Cook the onions until softened, then lower the heat to a simmer and gently brown them for about 25 minutes.

CHAPTER 5

 

“This tastes weird, like a chemical,” Jodi said, rolling her tongue around her mouth. The rest of the students nodded, murmuring agreement. The subject? Iodized table salt. “Gosh, it never occurred to me that salt could taste different from one another.”

I planned to focus on vegetables for the second class, a major culinary blind spot for the volunteers. Yet I could not shake the ongoing references to bland recipes and the sense of inadequacy that I'd heard in regard to their palates. The simple phrase “Season to taste” was greeted with the enthusiasm of a tax audit.

“I hate it when a recipe says that,” Shannon said when we visited her. “What does that mean? Whose taste? Mine? How do I know what tastes right?”

“I find it daunting,” Trish said of the equally vague standard recipe phrase “Check seasonings.” “Check for what? I don't know what I'm trying to make it taste like, you know? What if my palate is just way off?”

One of the most crucial lessons at Le Cordon Bleu—and for any cook—is the concept of taste, taste, taste. The chefs admonished us to taste or sniff every ingredient
before
we added it to a dish, and then to taste the dish during the cooking process, and then to taste it yet again before serving. “How can you tell how your dish will turn out if you don't taste the ingredients you're putting into it?” a chef would say. If you wait to taste a dish when it's done, it's often too late to fix anything wrong.

One reason the woman in the supermarket relied on boxed or frozen food was that “it always turned out.” Most of the volunteers reported that even careful attention to some recipes yielded bland results. Both stemmed from a fundamental lack of understanding of flavor. Gen had described a recipe for a simple steamed broccoli dish. When I asked if she'd considered adding something extra, say, some lemon or extra black pepper, she shook her head. The recipe didn't say to do it, and she feared “messing it up.”

“Slavish followers of recipes, who treat them as gospel instead of guidelines, make the mistake of putting more faith in someone else's instructions than they do in themselves,” note Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, authors of
The Flavor Bible.
“Many people would do better in the kitchen if they
didn't
blindly follow recipes.”

One key is to start with good ingredients, understand their affinity with other flavors, and go from there. Some flavors naturally go together, such as basil and tomato, fig and bleu cheese, or even chocolate and peanut butter. The key here would be to figure out a way to convince the volunteers that spending a bit extra for flavorful quality ingredients was worth it. Most said that when it came to food, cost trumped any consideration of flavor, echoing Sabra's comments that most frozen meals tasted the same to her, so she went for the cheapest options.

This focus on cost versus flavor was not limited to the group or even to this generation. In her 1937 story “Pity the Blind in Palate,” M. F. K. Fisher lamented that many Americans shovel in the same fare with dogged regularity, rarely stopping to think about what they are eating. “We eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us,” she wrote. “We are ignorant of flavor. We are as a nation taste-blind.” But Fisher acknowledged that if a person sampled a variety of things, stopping to ponder the sensations and subtle differences, then hope existed to awaken the palate.

But how would I get this point across? As I often do when I've got something to think about, I went to the supermarket.

At nearly 10:30 P.M., the place was relatively quiet, with few shoppers. The scent of floor wax drifted over to the canned-goods aisle. I started to spend more time in the center aisles, where I had met the woman with the chicken, hoping to run into her again.

“Mommy, which kind of canned tomatoes do you want?” I turned, hoping it was her daughter. Instead, it was a preteen with braces in a pink fleece sweater over a pink dance outfit and pink sneakers.

Her mother, staring down at her phone, answered without looking up. “Whatever's the cheapest, sweetie. It doesn't matter. They're all the same.”

The girl tossed two cans of diced store-brand tomatoes into their cart and the pair rolled away. I stood contemplating the wall of tomatoes featuring nineteen different brands that offered them whole, diced, peeled, fire-roasted, organic, imported, and packed with basil.

Do
they taste the same? I thought of M. F. K. Fisher's argument and of the chefs who made us taste everything in order to develop what's often referred to as “taste memory.” I thought of the book
The Tasting Club
by Dina Cheney. Essentially, the book suggests comparative tastings of olive oil, cheese, olives, coffees, teas, and the like as a centerpiece for social gatherings. Why not comparatively taste canned tomatoes? I selected nine different varieties of diced and took them in my arms to the checkout. “Someone likes tomatoes,” the checker said blithely as he ran them across the scanner.

“Taste is personal. We all taste very differently,” Cheney told me later. “We have different sensory thresholds and different taste memories. Ultimately, it's about finding out what we like and trusting our own palates. That's all that matters.”

A veteran of more than 150 comparative tastings across the country, Cheney discovered that people are frequently taken aback by how much variety exists within one category of food or drink. In her experience, she found that people remain loyal to one brand or dedicated to the notion of buying the cheapest option, but rarely consider tasting different brands or varieties back to back. “When people do, they're surprised at how many differences there are between, say, various brands of seventy percent dark chocolate bars or canned tuna. They might realize the brand to which they've been so loyal is actually mediocre and they much prefer another one. That's why tastings often change our buying habits.”

For the next week, I studied everything that I could find about the issue of taste and flavor. Taste is physical. Our tongues detect only five options: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, a savory sense of earthiness equated with soy, meat, and mushrooms. Flavor happens in our brains, determined by what we perceive from our senses. Not everyone tastes the same. Some “supertasters” experience certain tastes more intensely than others, particularly salt and bitter.
¹⁴
At the other end of the spectrum fall the “nontasters” with a dulled ability to distinguish individual tastes. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. Most scientists believe genetics is a factor.

So our ability to distinguish taste is nature. But preference is nurture; what flavors we like is something we learn. None of this is new to the wine world, where it's long been accepted that you can “train your palate” to appreciate minute subtleties in wine. That in turn leads to the confidence of someone declaring he's detected flavors such as “black currant,” “rotted wood,” or “gym socks” after taking a cursory sip from a glass of Cabernet Franc.

Prompted by Cheney's book and my cache of canned tomatoes, I constructed a series of blind tastings with everyday cooking ingredients: olive oil, salt, Parmesan cheese, the tomatoes, and chicken stock. Lisa and I raided our own pantries and then hit a couple of grocery stores. We walked through the aisles and tossed various cans and bottles into the cart.

We arrived at the teaching kitchen in time to meet up with Lauri Carter, a local chef who had heard about the project and offered to volunteer to teach a lesson on vegetables. Lauri is an energetic petite brunette with deep dimples and a cheerleader-like can-do spirit. I half expect her to break out into a cheer at times, and I mean that in a good way. That summer, Lauri faced her own existential challenge. After four years as the chef and owner of her popular bistro, Moxie, her landlord unexpectedly broke her lease. She found herself covering shifts at a fashionable Spanish wine bar downtown, trying to figure out what to do next. She's smart, a gifted cook, and a good explainer. If anyone could inspire people about vegetables, Lauri could do it. She took the sudden addition of a tasting to her planned vegetable lesson in stride.

As the students wandered in from one of the first sunny Seattle summer days, they looked around, puzzled. Clusters of small plates took up every open countertop. Lisa and I labeled each with a letter or number. As they put on their aprons and grabbed a diaper for their side towels, we handed each person a small yellow legal pad.

“We'll explain what these are for once we cover some vegetable basics,” I said. I introduced Lauri and she took my spot at the center of the worktable. She started first with potatoes: russet, red, white Idaho, Yukon Gold, and even purple. The volunteers examined them raw. “The purple ones are so pretty!” Gen said.

To prepare the potatoes, Lauri went on to demystify a commonly misunderstood term—
sauté.
Based on the French word for “jump,”
sauté
simply means to cook something quickly in a bit of oil at high heat. “So, where the jump comes in is from the way professional chefs cook. I'll show you.” The crew huddled around the big six-burner stove. The skillet looked comically large in her small hand. “First, add some oil to a pan and let it get hot,” she explained. “When you sauté food, it should sizzle when it hits the pan.” Lauri tossed in a handful of sliced potatoes that hissed when they hit the hot skillet. She shook the pan as soon as they landed. “Shake it right away, enough so that the food moves a bit, and then it won't stick during the rest of cooking.” Lauri added a couple of pinches of coarse salt from a small ramekin by the stove.

“So notice the salt in the dish,” she said, holding it overhead. “Chefs have dishes with salt rather than shakers. You know why?” The group collectively shook their heads. “If you shake salt from a shaker, you can't see the salt. It's hard to tell how much you're putting in. But with salt in a little dish, you can literally grab a pinch of salt.” An “ahhhh” went over the group.

Lauri tugged at the pan's handle and tossed the potatoes in the air, and they fell back into the pan.

“Jump. It makes sense now,” Jodi said.

Lauri had each volunteer do at least one shake of the pan. “You want to cook the vegetables until they start to brown. That's known as caramelizing, which just means the heat has drawn out some of the natural sugar in the vegetables. That's when they start to turn tasty.”

To practice their knife skills from the week prior, we then dumped about ten pounds of potatoes on the counter. The students huddled around Sabra as she showed off her new knife, purchased from a restaurant supply store.

“Oh, that's a smart idea. I didn't think about shopping at a restaurant supply store,” Jodi said. “I thought they might card me at the door or something.”