Elements of Taste

I just love compositional guidelines and design principles. It fascinates me to no end that basic design principles such as balance, contrast, repetition, form and the like show up in so many domains of life. Right now I am looking at a book called The Elements of Taste by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, and they have a great little system for composing flavours and textures to make creative dishes. I won't share any of their recipes here, but I will describe some of their more interesting design ideas.

NARRATIVE: There are narrative arcs in eating experiences. When you take a bite of something, there is an initial flavour/texture - an "introduction" or an "attack" flavour. Flavours then build and change into the middle of the mouthful. They may peak to a climax, or build through the middle to a big finish, or broaden through the middle towards a mellow finish, or whatever. Then there is the finish and the aftertaste.

Finish and aftertaste become the context for the next mouthful of the food, so the time you spend eating one dish will also have a beginning, middle and end. One of my favourite experiences at this level are "slow burn" foods like chili, Indian/African curries or many Korean dishes, which start out with a sharp spicy attack, but then you get used to the spices and things mellow out into the middle, but by the end the burn has built up so much that you are starting to sweat.

The courses of a meal have a narrative structure too, so you can start out with a fresh opening, shift to a savoury slow burn middle, and end with a tangy, floral, sweet dessert, for example. Each act of the meal, beginning, middle and end, can also have a cast of characters - several different flavour/texture/temperature elements that diners will play off against (or with) each other as they eat. Kunz and Kaminsky call this level of food analysis the TASTE LOGIC of a meal.

This idea is too cool!

TASTE PLATFORMS: Kunz and Kaminsky isolate four taste platforms or basic scaffoldings for other elements of the taste experience: GARDEN, MEATY, OCEANIC and STARCHY. These are pretty self-explanatory. One cool thing I inferred from their recipes is that GARDEN palettes allow for a lot of crunch and colour, but also that flavours are often chosen to amplify each other in GARDEN food - e.g. adding both cherry tomatoes and orange bell peppers to a salad to multiply the sweet, tangy and floral notes in the salad. With MEATY platforms, balance is more often sought, bringing salt, tanginess, bulby/allium flavours (onions/garlic/shallots), sweetness, vinted (wine) and funky (age-related - old cheeses, etc) into harmony with each other. There are also two main MEATY notes - the deep flavours of dark meats and the top notes of white meats.

OCEANIC palettes are often already salty, and adding tang and herbaceousness can bring the delicate flavours out more. So like GARDEN, multiplication of flavour is a basic compositional strategy here. STARCHY palettes can be full and nutty, bland and supportive of other flavour elements (providing contrast and balance) or crisp/toasted. Starch and tang really cut each other nicely - witness vinegar on french fries.

So the two levels of TASTE LOGIC and FLAVOUR PLATFORMS set the stage for the drama, the actual actors are the tastes, which Kunz and Kaminsky divide into three categories:

- TASTES THAT PUSH (Salty, picante, sweet)
- TASTES THAT PULL (Tangy, vinted, bulby, spiced aromatic, floral herbal, funky)
- TASTES THAT PUNCTUATE (Bitter)

PUSHING means heightening all the other tastes in a recipe. Salt, spicy heat and sweetness all bring out other flavours. They up the whole flavour profile of the dish. PULLING tastes tend to isolate aspects of the underlying or overall taste of a dish to accentuate it. They make flavours more distinct instead of smoothing them or rounding them out. TANG can heighten and accent the SWEET and FLORAL of fruit, and FUNKY tastes like truffles accentuate the MEATINESS of earthy, savoury dishes.

BITTER has a special role. It slams the brakes on other flavours. Beer is a sugary drink and it would be far too sweet and cloying without the bitterness of hops to slam the brakes on that sweetness. Having cranberry sauce with meat is not the equivalent of having jam on your meat because the bitterness of cranberries slams the brakes on that sweetness and prevents it from overpowering the taste. Salt licorice is incredibly salty, but it is edible because the bitterness of the unsweetened (or is it semi-sweetened) licorice stands guard against all that salt. Conversely, too much bitterness can be countered by salt, sweet, floral or aromatic, etc. Bitterness helps create structure in the food that can hold up to stronger flavourings.

So that's the gist of their system. It is very interesting. The recipes in the book are illuminating as well, although they are a bit fancier than anything I would make myself. I love their design vocabulary, though. It rocks!