The Six Flavors of Cooking

Sour, sweet, salt, bitter, hot, umami are what make a dish complete.

There are six flavors available in everyone's pallet: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, hot, and umami (a.k.a. savory).These flavors are universal, but not all in equal porportions. Most times just a touch will round out the recipe. Keep in mind that these six flavors do not have to be present in every bite, but by the end of the meal all together they will satisfy your taste and the meal overall.

Sour

If you have had the chance to eat with a small child you will notice that sour is the first flavor the child notices; every notice how they enjoy lemons and pickles? The sensory location for sour is in the front of the tongue. The sweet sensor is further back on the tongue and is perceived as a child grows older. Unfortunately, once a child experiences sweet there's no going back to sour. 

For me sour is the quintessential flavor. All of the vinegars, citrus, and pickling are based on this flavor though using too much of any of these flavors destroys the dish. That said, the lemon is my favorite. I love to take the whole lemon, peel and de-seed it, and then dice and macerate it. This gives me the juice and the pulp and encourages that flavor in the rest of the dish. Often I will add a little red wine or apple cider vinegar to increase the pH and give a little more kick on the acid side. Other fine examples are balsamic, Champagne, rice wine vinegars.

Sweet

Sweet is the easiest of all the flavors to provide, but unfortunately it is the worst for you. Modern manufactured sweet includes the high fructose corn syrup. It cannot be produced at home because it needs high pressure and high temperature. It can only be manufactured in commercial Laboratories. Fact is, it’s a byproduct of making ethanol from corn. It also is much cheaper than sugar. (The U.S. sugar industry — and its price — is controlled by a cartel of half a dozen families; U.S. sugar prices are among the highest in the world.)

An added downside of high fructose syrup is that it is digested by the liver — not the intestines — and triggers creation of triglycerides (fat) and cholesterol. Consuming a great deal of it — and it is more and more common in processed foods these days — taxes your liver and can lead to diabetes, cancer and high blood pressure.

So use sugar sparingly; alternatives are maple syrup, honey, molasses, stevia, light brown and natural sugar which, in small volumes, can enhance all of our cooking.

Salt

Long ago, salt was an extremely valuable commodity and was used mainly to preserve meats and fish. Salt was a currency. Wars were fought over it. Today with modern processing — think mining and evaporation of sea water — salt has become very inexpensive. Yet it is still valuable to cooking. 

Again, beware of processed food because it is loaded with salt, primarily because it maintains a taste for a long period of time. Salt, though, is extremely useful in cooking. It is great for fermenting vegetables to make sauerkraut or pickles. It is often used as a brining agent, particularly poultry. The simple science of salt is osmosis: At the molecular level, the cell with the salt will cause electrolysis to drain water toward the salt cell. In poultry, for example, the salt brine will cause the protein cells to break down and thus blood and moisture will drain out. 

Since the essence of cooking is eliminating moisture and cook the proteins, salt becomes a more efficient way to evaporate moisture and, in the process, intensifying the flavor. 

However, sometimes we want to add moisture back to the process. A simple example would be in making broth from the carcass of poultry. The best technique is to brine the poultry overnight in a salt solution that is 10 times more salty than normal water. (A variation for grilling: add half as much sugar as salt; the sugar will coat and seal the outside of the poultry and burn on the grill but it is a pleasant, light smokey flavor.) When I'm cooking pasta, I like to over salt the water because the residuals are slightly diminished and the pasta has more flavor. 

For most cooks getting salt right is tricky. For instance, when I’m making a sauce, or soup I do not add salt until I'm about to serve. Then I still think of salt as a linear flavor separate from the cooking process. Start with less and work up; taste it several times. Better to put in less salt that you think you will need. (Putting in too much salt can be remedied by adding more ingredients; cooked potatoes, if appropriate, can sometimes be used to diminish the flavor of the salt.)

And beyond flavor, keep in mind that, again, too much salt, can lead to high blood pressure diabetes and obesity (creating osmosis in reverse; the salt in your cells attracts more water to it, and you retain water).

Chef’s note: Just a quick reminder that the manufacturers of processed food have trained our bodies to want more salt, fat and sugar. This cooking newsletter is intended to encourage you to cook your own food and stay away from the processed foods. While I know cooking will take longer, it will result in a healthier, happier, and lighter body.

Bitter

The more interesting flavor is bitter. It's usually found in seeds. Often I sauté my seeds in a hot pan to increase their flavor; dry roasting also mellows the flavor slightly. A good example is coffee. The coffee beans are actually the seed. (An aside: most Americans tend to like a light roast (French roast); closer to the equator, people like a dark roast which is lower in caffeine.)

By using a hot dry pan i.e. no oil, we can slowly evaporate the minuscule moisture out of the seed, and toast the seeds from a light green to a medium brown to a dark brown depending on the recipe. Cumin, dill, and corriander seeds are a few examples of seeds that are improved when toasted and crushed. Usually the darker the roast, the more intense flavor. The burn itself is going to be slightly bitter, but just before the burn there is the most intense flavor available. 

Wine is the best source of bitter when planning the overall meal. I know that wine is liquid, but it is really “food”. Wine production is affected by many items. Such as the amount of sun, rain, coolness, and the soil. Once grown and harvested, the grapes are crushed and the fermentation starts. After letting the grape juice settle, one of the sediments in tartar. Which is just below the skin of the grape. Tasted on its own it is almost like alum which makes our mouth pucker it is so bitter, which contributes slightly to the overall taste of most wines. We use it in cooking as cream of tartare when used with egg whites, causes the egg whites to become quite stiff when beaten, and then can be folded into soufflés and cakes to make the item appear lighter. Drinkingg wine with a meal directly covers bitter, but it does so much more to the overall enjoyment of a meal.

Chef’s note: Sometimes I'm referred to as El Charro, because I like to take the food to that “almost” burnt stage. Unfortunately even I can't always get it exactly right. But it is worth risking, because you intensify the flavors and to the sophisticated palate, bitter can create the most complexity

Hot

Hot can sometimes be thought of as an optional flavor. For some the flavor is too irritating and prevents the enjoyment of the food. Some cultures celebrate hot, and it almost becomes a challenge as to how much they can handle. I am of the mindset that a little bit used properly adds complexity to the overall flavor. I wonder if the older you get the more your taste buds diminish and the more you want to add hot/heat to the meal. (Conversely, as we age, our stomachs become more sensitive and, so, are less able to handle hot!)  If using fresh hot peppers keep in mind that the seeds often hold too much heat for too long. It's usually a good idea to remove the seeds and just use the pulp as desired.

Umami (Savory)

The last flavor is umami. It is often confused with the flavor/texture that the palate gets from fat. Umami makes food taste more luscious. A good example is Parmesan cheese. The Italians have spent centuries figuring out what grain to feed to what kind of cow to promote the right culture to produce wheels of Parmesan cheese. That knowledge and process produces a unique cheese that is like nothing else in the world.

chef’s note: In some gourmet Italian restaurants the hot freshly cooked pasta is tossed in the hollowed out wheel of Parmesan and then tossed if their is additional sauce to produce a flavor that isomer the top.

Economics is the queen of the sciences, and most of us have to be mindful as to how much each ingredient costs. Parmesan cheese is expensive, but well worth it. So you've made a wonderful pasta dish, and at the very end you grate a little fresh Parmesan on top. The amount you use is minuscule so it ends up not costing too much, but with the person eating the meal’s first bite has the surface covered with Parmesan cheese, the whole meal is going to taste better because the new umami flavor has been released, and causes the pasta and sauce to meld as one.

Another product that has a high umami flavor is soy sauce. True soy sauce has the advantage of being salty, and loaded with umami flavors. So if you're cooking a meal, and it's not dependent on a light cream sauce, I always like to use soy sauce. Soy sauce is produced from soybeans that have been fermented for a period of time from several months to several years. Most of the commercial domestic soy sauce adds wheat to the process, which creates decent product in a much quicker time. However, today many people are gluten intolerant, and soy sauce made with wheat is unacceptable. The original Japanese soy sauce is referred to as tamari. Tamari is available in Asian stores and does not incorporate wheat, but takes considerably longer to make and is therefore more expensive. Because so many people now are gluten intolerant, the local commercial brands have started using rice instead of wheat, to speed up the process and to not incorporate gluten. Check the bottle.

Another umami food source is the mushroom. This is often why sauces that contain mushrooms are so flavorful, such as mushroom marsala. However some people don't like the texture of cooked mushrooms. I recommend that you sauté and cook the mushrooms and then strain them out if the texture is not desirable. It is one of my go to items. 

Chef’s note: White button mushrooms are attractive for their size and color. However if they're not picked immediately they turn brown. We called those crimini mushrooms. And if they continue to grow, they become Portobello mushrooms. They are all the same species just marketed under different sizes and names. There are many other species of mushrooms — shiitake, oyster etc — but they give the vegetarian that umami flavor.

Without a doubt the most expressive Unami is from truffles. Truffles are an underground fungi that attaches to the root of certain trees. In Italy they will use dogs with specially trained noses or muzzled pigs that go nuts when they get a whiff of the truffle. The handler has to be observant or the pig will eat the truffles before being able to harvest. Even though we cannot sense the truffles under ground, when we use a small amount of truffles in our cooking some sort of sensor in our brain activates the taste buds to light up and make that particular dish astounding.