Notes from Stella's Kitchen

Paul came back from a meeting in New Orleans complaining about the Jambalaya he had been served. It was tasty all right, but its flavor was too uniform, the chicken, the pork, the rice all had the same flavor. He said that if he closed his eyes and put a piece in his mouth he would not have been able to tell if it was chicken or pork by just its taste.

During the meal, the chef came out and proudly asked how they liked the Jambalaya. He told everyone that he had spent the whole morning fixing and cooking it and that he had added his secret spices especially for the meeting.

I’m not sure what happened, but from what Paul described I think the chef may have spent too much time cooking the food and the flavors had all merged as it was cooking. No matter how many secret spices he had in the pot, it would not have cured this one major mistake.

I think it’s a mistake many cooks make. They forget that a good dish is made up of many different separate and distinct flavors, that the person eating should be constantly experiencing flavors that compliment one another but stand on their own, independent but complimenting the other tastes in the dish.

I know that this is often not easy to do. I’m not saying there should not be a blending of flavors, but the amount of blending should be controlled. The final blend should bring about the taste results that the cook wants.

As I said this can be difficult. When we are cooking we are working with natural ingredients that vary in size, freshness, origin and type. After all when the recipe calls for one egg, how big is one egg? and think of the millions of varieties of potatoes, onions, tomatoes, etc. Because of this, the natural ingredients in a recipe are difficult to control in a exact way as we cook. But that is why the tasting spoon is always kept so close to the cooking pot and why most good cooks have gray hairs.

You can have fun with this separation of tastes. For our breakfast last Sunday, instead of fixing an omelet made up of a medley of fried peppers, onions and sausage, I cooked them all separately, serving them amid a pile of scrambled eggs on one large platter on the table. We then piled on each of our plates the proportions of each that we wanted. Paul shoveled in big forkfuls of mixes of all of these and if the amount that disappeared is any measure, he was quite happy.

Now an omelet of exactly the same ingredients that I had cooked separately would have tasted much different. It would have been equally as good and the piled forkfuls would have been gone into Paul just as happily, but it would have been a different dish and it would have had a different taste. In the tiny minute when the foods would have been combined on the stove, the flavors would have blended together and we would have had a something completely different from what we had.

However, remember there are good omelets and bad omelets. What separates a good omelet from a bad one is combining the ingredients not just in their proportion but in the timing of when they are added,

This lack of separation of the various flavors that make up a dish is what happens when we overcook food or serve leftovers (although, I will admit, an awful lot of leftovers and many soups taste better the next day. Proper aging is a secret of many cooks). If the timing is off, the flavors in the dish start to combine beyond what the cook wants and we are left with a dull tasteless dish.

I have no secret advice on how to prevent this except to say that when you cook, use the spoon to taste test and when serving leftovers, taste them before putting the dishes on the table. You may not sit down as hungry as everyone else at the table, but they will love your cooking.

Bon Appetit!