Season to Taste

Buck Reed, The Supermarket Gourmet “Season to taste.” In the world of culinary arts, this might seem like a small sentence, but in the kitchen this can be a big concept. Say “season to taste” to the wrong student and the fear in his or her eyes grows faster than the line at a Vegas buffet. Immediately, they want to know how much salt they should use. Why can’t they measure it out? You would think I was asking them to design and build a nuclear power plant. For a few, “season to taste” was a concept easily absorbed, but for many, you had to drag them kicking and screaming—they just were not going to get it. Trying to explain it in an article may seem impossible, but you can’t really write an abstract piece every month and not try to tackle the big ideas. (Just writing a sentence like that proves I have the ego to try.) On the cruise ships, we called it the blessing. Every soup or sauce got seasoned with salt, pepper, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice. Naturally, we did this as a last step, and it is probably more important than any other step. Seasoning your dish properly will not save a bad dish, but if done properly, it can turn a good dish into something memorable. The trick is moderation. Just as we do not want to over-salt a dish, we do not want to overdo it with any of the ingredients in the blessing. Clearly, a certain finesse is called for in this situation. You want to add enough lemon juice or vinegar to make you wonder what that was, yet not so much as it over-powers the dish. In this case, practice makes perfect. Many professional chefs employ a salt and pepper blend, enhancing the mixture with different spices or herbs. Kosher or sea salt is preferred because of its size; being a bigger grain, it makes it easier for us to measure how much we have when we use our fingers as we add it. Pepper and Tabasco add a piquant flavor to the dish. Worcestershire sauce adds an umami flavor to your dish. Umami is a fairly recent term used to describe a savory flavor in food. Lemon juice adds an acidic flavor to food that when used correctly literally adds a lip-smacking quality to your dish. Another great finishing ingredient used in a savory dish might be sugar. I like adding brown sugar to bean soups and salad dressings, and it even works well to enhance egg and tuna salad. The same rules apply as to not overwhelming the dish. Prepared mustard can add a unique flavor as well. Today, a lot of professional chefs are swearing by fish sauce as the miracle flavoring. They are adding it to everything from peanut butter sandwiches to ice cream. Care must be taken to properly season your food in the end. It does you no good to make a beautiful broccoli soup, adjusting the consistency, chopping the vegetables, and getting just the right color, if you cannot season it correctly before you serve it. If you have any questions or ideas on a future article, please feel free to stop me on the street (seriously, I am not that busy) or write to me at [email protected].