How to balance the flavours in your cooking

Sweet, salt, bitter, sour and umami – is getting taste right an art or a science?Heinz is not the market leader in tomato ketchups for nothing. In his exhaustive New Yorker essay on why no other make can compete for the ketchup crown, Malcolm Gladwell concludes that Heinz's secret lies in its perfect balance of the five basic tastes: sweet, salt, bitter, sour and umami. Granted, branding is influential, but you don't shift 650m bottles each year unless it tastes good. There's no doubt that a perfect balance of tastes is essential in achieving ultimate deliciousness.It can be galling when you follow a new recipe to the letter, and the kitchen fills with mouth-watering aromas, yet the food is lacking something when you taste it. It's like getting all gussied up for a party, but somehow the overall effect isn't as spectacular as you'd envisaged. It is, of course, a given that recipes will always need tweaking to account for different cooking conditions and personal tastes. But these days most westerners learn how to cook from printed recipes, and I for one was never instilled with an instinct for balancing tastes. It may be bleeding obvious when something's too salty or acidic or whatever, but only experience can teach you how to fix it. And then there's the more subtle practice of improving an OK dish by adding a pinch of this, a tad of that, until it sings.The art of seasoningThis, argues the food writer and former food scientist Jules Clancy in her blog, is about far more t...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: theguardian.com Blogposts Food & drink Life and style Science Source Type: news