Flavor

I’m not always sure where inspiration comes from. My mother, who is very creative, always says, “Creativity isn’t linear. You can’t just sit down and decide to be creative.” It can come from so many angles: what I had for dinner last night, the book I read, going to the museum. It might start with a technique. It can start with Alex [Stupak, wd-50's pastry chef] asking what fruit or vegetable would be good with a dessert he’s working on.

There is a part that’s calculated. There’s a framework we use. We always have to balance the dish: sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, umami, sourness. Especially sourness. I got that from [working under] Jean-Georges Vongerichten, without a doubt. You always notice laser-sharp balance with acidity in his food. He’s always preached that, so that’s always one of our first questions. How do we give the dish some acidity?

For example, something we’re working on now is langoustine with bay leaf granola and a preserved-lemon dust — no, that’s too precious sounding — but like a cookie crumbled up into sand. This sand has all the complexities of the fruit. But the plate needs some juiciness or a sauce. We got a little stuck there.

To relax at home one night, I opened a Chinese cookbook I like, and it fell on a page on sesame seeds. So then I start thinking about tahini, maybe a black sesame tahini for the dish? There’s a randomness there. I didn’t open the book looking for inspiration, but now sesame is on my radar. That’s how it works; sometimes you can’t force it. But I tell all my cooks to jot down their ideas all the time, and to be open to them when you’re away from work.

Rachel Hagen, the flavorist profiled in the story, talks about her plans to try slipping menthol into butterscotch, something she describes as being “interesting, that makes you think.’” What do you think qualifies a flavor as “interesting”? What flavor combinations make a person think?

We have inherent curiosity for the new. Granted, we’re not necessarily going to create new flavors, we’re not finding many new ingredients. The pantry doesn’t really change, but the pairings and arrangements can change.

What we like to do is either something like eggs Benedict and present it in a way that turns it on its ear, [slow-cooked egg yolks with deep-fried hollandaise and Canadian-bacon crisps –Ed.] or we take seemingly disparate flavors and put them together.

In the article, they were tasting a citrus fruit and talking about finding notes of clove, Gouda cheese, yeast. Oh my god, that sounds great. Yeast, citrus and clove? That’s a beginning of a dish right there. To me, that sounds very disparate, but to them, those are closely related elements, tied together by this fruit. Sometimes these flavors just need some contextualizing.

So what connects quails to bananas to tartar sauce?

You didn’t like that dish? That’s OK. We shouldn’t always agree on everything; that would be no fun. It all seemed logical when I tried it. You know, sometimes one’s ego gets in the way and you go, “I don’t care when people tell me I don’t like it,” but then you look back and see that it was a dog. But with that dish, I mean, David Chang liked it and that’s all I need to know. [Laughs.]

There are a couple of things that Rachel Hagen does that intrigue me: She keeps paint chips in her office to help her memorize flavors, using the colors to symbolize a particular aroma. She also describes a scene while camping, and talks about wanting to “paint” that scene as a flavor combination. Do you translate flavor into other forms? Does flavor symbolize things to you?

That didn’t seem weird to me. She was talking about pine and cedar for the woods, lemon for the sun, and vanilla for the fog. I don’t know that I would be going to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, when I eat that, but could think of a walk in the woods or something.

We can eat something and trigger a memory. Heston [Blumental, of The Fat Duck, outside London] has a dish inspired by sweet shops of his youth, licorice and coconut. Those were not the flavors of my candy store, but it can still be transporting.

But you have to be a diner who wants to be transported, to bring that childlike openness to the table. You have to want to submit to the illusion. Think of when Grant [Achatz, of Alinea, in Chicago] burns leaves for his dishes. Some people might think of campfires, which is nice, and others might think of their neighbors burning their leaves on their lawn all the time, and it pisses them off.

People come up to me and say, “I know what you’re trying to do! That was supposed to be like a hot dog!” And I think, “No, that’s not what I was doing,” but I don’t want to squash what they’re thinking. I like that I can’t control that. It’s great to have people have their own interpretation.

So how do you push people to have an interpretation? As you said earlier, your dishes are familiar things presented unconventionally, and unfamiliar things presented more approachably. Would you ever make a dish that was totally off the wall, with nothing normal to hold on to?

We’ve done that. We’ve done dishes that take all reference points away from people, sometimes to greater effect than others. But I hesitate to use the word “challenge,” because I don’t want to engage the diner too aggressively. In my youth, I did that too much. I hope I’ve matured in my approach to that. We’ve grown more comfortable, less showy for the sake of being showy. I like to be eating out of my comfort zone, but not everyone is like that. Not everyone wants to think about their food that way. Recognizing that is part of being a responsible restaurant.

I spent three hours at the Matthew Barney show at the Guggenheim Museum. I walked around really confused and dismayed, not sure what he was trying to tell me. I didn’t feel like I could evaluate it, because I just didn’t get it. And I guess that’s something that some people experience at my restaurant.

I wasn’t upset that I didn’t get it. I was disappointed in myself. I think some people are prepared for that for certain art forms. But you don’t have to go to a museum if you don’t want to; you do have to eat.

I like the idea of having a couple dishes that are like, “Whoa, this doesn’t make sense to me.” But how does it taste? It’s fun to go hog wild, but at the end, it has to taste good.

But hey, I did it for you. And even better, I also called Jane Daniels Lear, who wrote the superb cookbook “One Spice, Two Spice” with chef Floyd Cardoz of Tabla, the most influential Indian-inflected restaurant in America, and I learned more than I ever thought I would about the buying, storing and fading of spices. Here’s what you should know.

How to buy and store spices:

“Six months?” Lear said, with a genteel indignation. “Some food Nazi probably made that rule up. Or someone from a spice company who just wants you to throw out all your spices twice a year.”

She continued: “To me, that rule is irrelevant, because it really depends on how old the spices are when you buy them, how they’ve been taken care of, and how you store them. So many people have them in clear bottles on a spice rack in the kitchen. There’s heat from the stove, and sunlight causes a reaction, like bleaching. Both of these are terrible for spices. But if you buy spices from a place with high turnover so their stock is fresh, and store them cool, dark, and dry, they will keep much longer than six months.“

Some other things to keep in mind when storing spices: It’s not just the stove and oven that are hot — the back of the fridge throws off a lot of heat, the toaster oven, your coffee machine, even the part of the kitchen where the sun streams in in the afternoons. So keep heat in mind when you decide where to let your spices live. And, Lear says, the freezer is a good option for spices that have a high oil content — like mustard seeds — so the oils don’t go rancid.

Well, OK, fine. But there’s still a reason for the six-month rule. Sort of:

When I started asking Nick Ciotti, V.P. of operations for the excellent Vann’s Spices about whether spices lose their flavor like Newton’s law of cooling, he thankfully interrupted with, “The short answer is yes,” saving me from completely displaying my ignorance of basic science.

“Once the spices are ground, right away there’s a sharp drop in their flavor. Spices are filled with volatile oils, which are what give them their flavor and complexity. When you grind them, you release those oils, and they begin to dissipate. In two weeks to a month after grinding, you have the sharpest drop in flavor, a rapid loss of those oils. But then it plateaus, losing its flavor at a more gradual rate. For the next few months, they’re pretty much the same, but by six months, you’ve really lost their complexity. It’s not just about potency and strength — for that, you can just add more of the faded spice. But you can’t ever get back the complexity. Black pepper from a year ago might still smell like pepper, but it won’t smell like orange and clove, the interesting aromas that a really fresh pepper has. After six months, it’s still totally usable, but it’s just a matter of what you want out of it.

But here’s the real key, what every pro will say about spices — buy them whole and grind them yourself:

Whole spices, well-stored in the way Lear suggests, will easily keep for a year. Ciotti explained it this way: “When they’re whole, they have this nice shell for all the volatile oils inside. When you grind spices fresh, you’re getting that first initial burst of all those oils, those flavors. They’re all there. But when you’re buying pre-ground spices in the grocery store, there’s no way to tell how long they’ve been sitting there. Most companies pull in ground spices that have been ground, warehoused, flown over to the U.S., warehoused here, then packaged and sold. It might be a year or two old already by the time you get them.”

Grinding your own spices requires hardly any work. Just drop your spices, toasted or raw, into a cheap coffee grinder and whirl them around, shaking the grinder a bit to get them moving into the blades, until you get a powder — whether you prefer course or fine is up to you. (Keep that coffee grinder expressly for spices. Really, don’t use it for coffee afterward. No matter how much you clean it, your coffee will taste totally weird.) A good rule of thumb is that you will end up with a half to a third of fine powder for the volume of whole spices you grind.

But, Lear says, “If I end up grinding a little extra than I use in a dish, I’m not worried about it. I throw everything left over into this little bottle we call ‘Sam’s spice rub’ that my husband uses on pork ribs. And it’s just wonderful. Or, the other day I had some extra ground coriander and I mixed it with salt. I’ve been using it on everything, and it made someone say my potato salad was the best they’ve ever had. Just adding a little bit of spice gives this extra mysterious something.”

Sometimes small amounts of a spice can be a problem, since you need a certain quantity in the grinder to reach up to the blades. When a recipe calls for a really tiny amount of a spice, Ciotti recommends a few options: You can also get a cheap little mortar and pestle and give them a really quick pound. Or see if there are other spices in the recipe and grind them all at once. Or you can add a little bit of salt to the spices in the grinder to bulk them out, and just use that as your salt for the dish.

And do different spices keep differently?:

Technically, yes. Ciotti points out both size and chemical factors. “Look at nutmeg — it’s rather large, very dense. It’s a really good encasement for all those oils. You can shave off a little at a time. But when you grind fennel, it’s extremely volatile. You lose a lot of that complexity even with a week.” But that is just stuff to argue about for purists and geeks. “Most people,” he says, “are still buying their spices pre-ground, so talking about complexity is a moot point. It almost doesn’t exist, until you put it up against something fresh and freshly ground. A really fresh black peppercorn smells like orange. It’s amazing. And something like that you’d never realize unless you experience it.”

If you have any food questions we can sleuth out for you, ask us! E-mail us at food[at]salon[dot]com. 

Well, hello again! Sorry, I must have gotten cut off there…

Anyway, despite the obvious simplicity of how to make a vinaigrette, there are wonderful, hidden complexities in it. (How come some separate back into oil and vinegar and some don’t? Why do some taste so much better than just oil and vinegar?) But even beyond that, what fascinates me about vinaigrettes is what they can teach us about how we taste food.

What it means to balance tastes

“Balance” is a word chefs throw around all the time, and what they mean by it is combining tastes in such a way that they temper and complement one another, with no one aspect overpowering the whole. Think of it this way: Drinking lemon juice straight-up is painful, but add some sugar to balance the tartness and: Boom! Lemonade!

So sugar will balance acidity and tartness, and vice versa. Salt and sugar also work on each other this way, and salt and tartness to some degree, too. Richness — oiliness and fattiness — is interesting because it’s not technically one of the four tastes (sweet, salty, sour and bitter), but it has a balancing relationship with tartness, which is why we put pickles and ketchup on fatty burgers, eat pork with sauerkraut, and why it’s always so surprising when someone points out that the main flavors in mayonnaise are oil and lemon. What? Yes. Mayonnaise is basically a sauce of oil and lemon.

So a vinaigrette is a dressing (or sauce, technically) that plays specifically on the balance between acid and oil. For me, a true balance is one where you really kind of can’t tell where the oiliness begins and the tartness ends, and the two seem just to swirl around each other. But some people prefer a vinaigrette that hits you sharply with its sourness in the beginning, mellowing to the richness of oil, and there are those who like theirs mainly slick and rich, with a note of tartness just to lighten things up.

Here’s a fascinating exercise: Take a vinegar and an oil you like. They don’t have to be amazing, but palatable would be good. Pour one tablespoon of the vinegar and three tablespoons of oil into small jar with a lid. (The standard ratio for vinaigrettes is 1-to-3, but naturally, since vinegars and oils and people differ, you’ll have to adjust to your own taste.) Shake vigorously until they combine, and taste it. What do you notice first? Tartness? Oil? Think about how the tastes change — does the mixture feel as if it goes from one to the other? If it’s too sharp, try adding more oil. If it tastes kind of flabby or greasy, try adding a little more vinegar. Play around with it. Probably none of these will be delicious (that’s what seasonings are for), but the point is to get a sense of how you prefer your balance — is it more toward the acid, or more toward the oil?

The elements of a vinaigrette, and their purpose

A vinaigrette can of course be just oil and vinegar, but there are a few other common elements.

Acid: Vinegar, or an acidic juice like lemon or lime. Not all vinegars are the same, by a long shot, and the really good ones are worth spending some money on — they can be complex and mellow and amazing, the utter opposite of, say, regular distilled white vinegar, which is harsh and has no flavor other than punched-in-the-face sour. And you’re never going to use a lot of it, so even an expensive bottle can be a great value for how much flavor you get out of it. (If you’re interested in learning more about vinegars, this is a great place to start.) But as a general guide, choosing a vinegar for your vinaigrette is a little like choosing wine — a white wine vinegar will taste and feel a little lighter than a red wine vinegar; an aged sherry vinegar should be a little fuller and more complex, with oaky notes. A light salad of very mild lettuces, for instance, would be sparkle with a white wine vinaigrette, but might be overpowered by an aged sherry vinaigrette.

Aromatics: Herbs, a minced clove of garlic, or a finely chopped shallot (my favorite, especially with a good aged sherry vinegar — boom!) can add a lot of flavor to a vinaigrette. The key, if you’re using garlic or shallot, is to let it sit in the vinegar for 20 minutes before you mix it with the oil. I don’t know exactly why, but the acid brings out and mellows their oniony flavors, making them round and delicious and taming their raw bite. Fresh herbs like mint, basil and parsley are wonderful just chopped right into the salad, but dried or tougher fresh herbs like thyme or rosemary also benefit from soaking in the vinegar first.

Seasonings: The unsalted life is not worth living, so a pinch of salt dissolved in the vinegar at the start will spark the flavors of your vinaigrette immensely. A touch of sugar will help you take the edge off the acidity if your vinegar is a little overly sour. Of course, a few cracks of black or white pepper are also always welcome. Other ground spices are wonderful, too. Citrus zest. Soy sauce. Sriracha. Hot sauce. Whatever. Go crazy.

Stabilizer: Try not to fall asleep for two minutes, but I’m going to talk about stabilizers and temporary and permanent emulsions. Are you still there? Hello? Sexomatic! (That always gets people’s attention.) Anyway, we’ll talk a lot more about emulsions another time, when we get to making mayonnaise, but an emulsion in cooking mainly refers to when you get oil and water to mix. (You know how they’re not supposed to mix? Well, they do. Kinda. But they don’t like to.) A well-made mayonnaise is a permanent emulsion, meaning it’s going to stay how it is forever. Many vinaigrettes are temporary emulsions, which is to say that you can get the oil and vinegar to combine into a smooth sauce for a while, but it will eventually “break” or separate back into a pool of oil sitting on top of a layer of vinegar.

There are two ways to keep them emulsified longer, though. One is agitation, breaking the two liquids into molecules so that they’ll float around one another without recombining with their own kind to form those layers. The more broken up the molecules, the longer the mixture will stay emulsified, so while they might separate after a few minutes if you whisk them together (which is often fine), the vinaigrette will stay emulsified much longer if you use a blender.

The other way is to add a stabilizer, which is often something as simple as mustard, powdered spices, or maybe a syrup or fruit reduction. These things will float around in that molecular mix, getting in the way, and preventing the oil molecules from hooking back up with each other. You’ll notice, too, that all these stabilizers are tasty things, so they add plenty of flavor as well.

Oil: What kind of oil to use? Mainly the question here is flavor: Some oils, like canola, are neutral and will magnify but won’t get in the way of other flavors. Some people insist all vinaigrettes must be made of fabulous extra-virgin olive oils, and I hear their point, but that’s a matter of taste; sometimes chefs like to cut their extra-virgin olive oils with canola or grapeseed or another neutral oil because those oils can be too fabulous — too strong in flavor (and too expensive). And then there are what I call the “garnish oils”: Asian sesame oil, pumpkin seed oil, walnut and other nut oils. These all have wonderful flavor, but are usually too strong to use as the main oil; you can use a more gentle oil as your base and then add a little bit of this stuff for flavor at the end.

Making the vinaigrette

OK, this is where we get back to the first sentence of this post. (1,500 words later … are you happy now, boss?)

Now that you know the standard ratio is 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil, now that you know your own preference for how to balance the oil and the acid, now that you know how to look for different vinegars, now that you know to soak the shallots and seasonings in the vinegar, now that you know you can make a vinaigrette out of pretty much any tart-tasting thing and any oil you like — yes, warm bacon fat counts; just keep the dressing in a warmer-than-room-temperature place after you make it — you’re ready to get whisking (or blending).

Understanding those basic elements, use your own creativity! I should add, though, that since vinaigrettes are so simple, the quality of your ingredients really, really matters. Go get yourself the good stuff.

Below, I’m sharing two recipes to show you how to bring the vinaigrette together, but feel free to riff however you’d like. There no reason, for instance, you can’t add mustard to the red wine vinaigrette, or shallots to the mustard version, and that’s obviously just the start.

Basic Red Wine Vinaigrette

Adapted from the Culinary Institute of America, “The Professional Chef.”

Makes 1 cup of vinaigrette, enough for dozens of salads

¼ cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon minced shallot
½ teaspoon salt
Pinch sugar, optional, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
¾ cup canola oil (or mix of canola and extra-virgin olive oil)

1. Combine everything but the oil and sugar in a bowl and let sit for 20 minutes.
2. Taste the vinegar mixture — it will be sour, but if it feels harsh, add a pinch of sugar.
3. Whisk the vinegar vigorously and pour the oil in thin stream. Alternatively, shake it all together in a jar with a lid, or zap it all in a blender or food processor.
4. The vinaigrette will eventually separate; just re-whisk or shake before using.

Basic Mustard Vinaigrette
This recipe uses mustard as a stabilizer and forms a much richer emulsion, nearly the same consistency as the mustard you start with. Adapted from the “Dean & Deluca Cookbook.”

Makes ¼ cup vinaigrette, enough for 10-12 salads if you dress them very lightly, like me.

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon cold water (optional)
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Whisk together the mustard and vinegar with a pinch of salt and a few cranks of pepper.
2. Now vigorously — don’t go all crazy and splash yourself! — whisk the mustard-vinegar mixture while you slowly drizzle the oil in a thin stream. It should look as if the mustard is absorbing the oil, giving you a nicely combined sauce. If the oil starts to pool a little at the top, stop pouring and just whisk it all together before resuming. Alternatively, shake it all in a jar with a lid or zap it in a blender.
3. If it’s too thick at the end (especially if you blend it), thin it with a tiny bit of water. (You’ll be amazed at how much a little water will thin it.)
4. If the vinaigrette separates, just whisk or shake or blend it back together before using.