Tasting as you cook

"Taste food as it cooks. Touch it. Smell it. Listen to it."

Samin Nosrat - Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

Such is the advice given in my Christmas gift book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat, and here she is - looking. However, in the introduction by Michael Pollard he says you must add taste to the basic four principles of cooking of the title.

"Samin Nosrat has taken the sprawling, daunting, multicultural subject we call cooking and boldly distilled it to four essential elements - or five, if you count the core principle of tasting along the way." Michael Pollard

And according to Samin Nosrat - touch, smell and sound as well. But it's true that taste dominates. 'Core principle' Michael Pollard calls it. It runs like a regular refrain throughout the book. Taste, taste, taste - all the time.

"Tasting and adjusting - over and over again as you add ingredients and they transform throughout the cooking process - will yield the most flavourful food." Samin Nosrat

So it's taste, or rather, tasting, I'm looking at today, for I have just picked up the book again today to attempt to get to the second part - the recipes. It's a big book and worthy of several posts. I think I have already done at least one. I was almost in to the recipe part, but she was still going on about tasting so this is what I chose for today.

I confess I don't taste my food much as I cook. I do however, look, listen and smell and even occasionally touch. So why don't I taste? Do you?

Maybe I think that if it smells good then it will taste good. Which I actually think is partly true. After all taste and smell are physically connected in some way are they not?

"...smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose...." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

So does that make smelling rather than tasting OK?

If you can't smell then you can't taste. Well I think that's so. And chefs certainly do taste. If you picture a chef, you probably picture him or her either manipulating a pan in some way or tasting something. Although probably not with his or her finger. That might be alright at home, but not in a professional kitchen. Just think of the health hazard in that.

So I wonder if deep in my soul I think that tasting food in a cheffy sort of way is somehow a bit pretentious. And do I really have good enough taste buds anyway? Our Adelaide wine-making friend used to use me as his test of the ordinary man - or woman - one with not much idea of what they were actually tasting but rather whether they liked it or not. I'm not sure that I can actually taste specific things, so I don't think I would ever make the grade as a chef.

"I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef's table... Unless they can identify what they're tasting, they don't get to cook it." Gordon Ramsay

I do remember also in the early days of Jamie Oliver - when he was into his Fifteen experiment - one big black mark for applicants was if they were not willing to taste potentially repulsive things. Like me and oysters.

Maybe I should try the blindfold thing some time. Although I am pretty certain that I would fail, and I am pretty sure that I have seen such experiments on the television in which people really could not tell what they were tasting. Red wine and white wine I vaguely remember was one such experiment. Somewhere at the back of my mind I know I have heard or read somewhere that most people would not be able to say what they were tasting if they could not see it.

“A cook should double one sense have: for he should taster for himself and master be.” Marcus Valerius Martialis, Roman poet (1st century B.C.)

So if the majority of people can't really be specific about tastes then maybe it's only the super tasters that can and maybe should get to be chefs. Like super sniffers who become perfumers. A very rare breed I believe. Maybe it's the same for taste. Though I did see one site that suggested you should experiment by tasting things before and after you added each ingredient for example. And surely it's another step again to move from recognising that something is not quite right to knowing what to do to correct it. Is it simply practice makes perfect, try and try again, or is it something you are born with?

To her credit Samin Nosrat seems to think that you can train yourself, and her book does an admirable job of taking you on that journey. This is one of the illustrations in her book - just look at the emphasis on Taste. And here are some more of her thoughts on the matter.

"there is no better guide in the kitchen than thoughtful tasting."

"Rely on your tongue, and taste at every point along the way."

"Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust. ... When constant tasting becomes instinctive, you can begin to improvise."

But, as I say, nothing to really help you to know what else to add. Which is maybe not quite fair, because she does provide lists and wheel diagrams of things that go together and things that balance and so on.

I suppose I should be encouraged by it all. I should be ready to make myself a great chef. But somehow or other I feel disheartened. I mean I know I will never be a great chef - and have never really wanted to be. Which is curious now that I think about it, because cooking is the thing I am best at - well that's what I think on my optimistic days. And yet I have sometimes wished that I could ski down a steep mountain or sing like an opera star and have never, never, never even come close to being able to achieve either of those things, being a hopeless sportswoman - I mean hopeless - and have never been able to read music or hit high or low notes. Maybe its the impossiblity of both of those that makes them so attractive, whilst being a chef is tantalisingly out of my grasp.

So I think the end result is that I now know that I should taste as I go along, but I doubt that I will, and anyway even if I do will I know what to do if what I taste is not right?