A matter of taste

(Last of the series on Cooking Schools)

We Filipinos have a tendency to flatter ourselves claiming we are the best in fashion, in sports or we have outstanding tourist spots and Pilipino cuisine. Actually we are trailing behind our ASEAN neighbors. If you taste the Thai hot and sour prawn soup, Tom Yam Kung, the broth spiked with lemongrass stalks, kaffir lime leaves, coriander leaves, red chilies and Nam Pla, the Thai patis, its pungent flavor and aroma leaves our favorite Sinigang dishes tasting flat.

Cooks’ extra sensory perception, criteria of WOFEX judges

“Avanti” Istituto Culinario cheered their classmates as Michael Santos, Chris Borja, Martino ‘Chino’ Salcedo, Anna Lisa Caparros, Roxanne Lorraine Ramos and Ian Frederick Gaffud joined the World Food Expo (WOFEX) competition at the SMX Convention Center the first week of August. The previous year, the Philippine team with Jay Gamboa, Ariel Manuel, Buddy Trinidad, Boy Pijola, Tony Bleza and Arnold Guevarra had just won first place preparing “a buffet for 30”, at the HOFEX, the Hongkong Food Expo.

Mike Santos who had just returned from the US to complete the culinary degree course at the Istituto remarked, “I never imagined that I would be able to share the same arena with professional chefs, international students and our country’s best schools. The 16 judges from all over the world while critiquing constructively our dishes appreciated our good points. This certainly is a far cry from our Culinary Grand Prix and TESDA competitions in the 2000s.”

Chris Borja who won the Silver in the wedding cake Decoration Category P2 had been participating frequently in the local Culinary Grand Prix competition. Thanks to the coaching of pastry chef Janice Cruz I was emboldened to do my best. He stated, “This is the most intense culinary competition in the country. We were to prepare our cake display within 1 1/2 hours. It is never easy to lay a plate or decorate a cake in front of competitors and judges. With frayed nerves participants can forget what they have practiced repeatedly before. But I still asked the judges what they thought of my work on a three layered white fondant cake “La Lampe.”

Chef Evald Notter, founder of the Notter School of Pastry Arts and a 5-Star Diamond awardee, “Of all the cake designs your cake is the cleanest. The string work is well refined and polished and I like the weave string work.” Chef Kenny Wong, Executive pastry Chef of Singapore Westin Plaza and of Pastry Alliance, “We do not look on how big or small the cake is. It is the design and décor that counts. I notice that many string works have different sizes. If one uses the rose motif, then the design must carry roses even at the base of the cake.”

Chino Salcedo, who tends to be edgy, although he has won in the past local culinary skill competition followed the advice of his coaches Chef Joseph Ventura and Chef Chris Bautista. “Do what you practiced. Pray and just enjoy the work.” And like magic that’s exactly what happened. Chino’s pasta with its unique carbonara sauce of poached egg, asparagus, and tapenada won Silver. What did the judges have to say? Executive Chef Alan Oreal, advisor of the WACS Global Development of Junior Chefs was impressed with how clean was my workmanship. He thought that I should lessen the pasta. Instead of two garnishes — the tortilla and blood sausage, only one would be sufficient.

The extra sensory perception

Enjoying food involves all the senses. When one has colds, his smell connected to the taste buds blocks the pleasure of eating. Japanese cuisine believes that half of the joy of eating is in the food presentation. Each dish from the simple miso soup with tiny brown mushroom, the colorful morsels of sushi and sashimi appetizers, the one piece entrée of grilled salmon accompanied by various pickles from Kyoto to the concluding fruit of the season dessert, makes use of a large array of artistic lacquered bowls, ceramic plates with different textures and designs. Even the Japanese fast food presentation, including the bento box sold in the bullet train or kabuki plays are just as artistic as the kaiseki or Japanese haute cuisine.

Other ASEAN dishes become popular using exotic curry, sambal, massalas (special curry paste with seven spices) and coconut milk. This includes Laksa Lemak and Mussaman Curry of Malaysia, Popiah lumpia of Singapore, the Burmese Mohingha, the Indonesian Nasi Goreng, Satay barbecue and Gado Gado.

Many cooks don’t taste what they cook

A crucial part of the evolution of a cook involves developing the ability to taste. This may seem basic but a surprising number of cooks don’t taste what they cook. Susan Spicer, chef owner of Bayona in New Orleans says, “I tell cooks they have no business being a cook if they are not willing to taste.” Joyce Godstein also observes that there are some chefs, who when you look at their menus, you know that they just play with ideas and put them together, and they have not eaten it. “It’s the difference between someone who’s an artist with food and someone who’s just intellectual with food.”

Learning to taste analytically is quite different from tasting to enjoy. Anyone is able to identify whether they find the taste of a dish pleasing or not. The experienced cook can analyze the particular combinations of flavors — of both ingredients and seasonings that make a dish right. The first aspect of seasoning a cook must learn is how to salt food. One should also learn to use freshly ground pepper from a peppermill. The preferred ratio of vinegar to oil for salad vinaigrette must be discovered by the young cook too. Even within dishes, the flavor of basic components can be altered with various cooking techniques; fried or roasted, boiled or roasted tomatoes, each with a different taste and fragrance.

The need for a tasting or palate course

European or American cuisine usually recognizes four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. Mark Miller says, “You begin to recognize that no one’s ever been taught how to taste. In Chinese there are five, there’s also “hot.” In Southeast Asia there’s also “aromatic.” There’s also “pungent” like fish paste (Bagoong or the Burmese Blanchan) which is neither sour nor bitter.”

Mr. Miller and the western company of cooks can only learn this wide range of exotic Eastern tastes from living and working in Asia because flavors are geographic and cultural. For instance we Filipinos developed a taste for Pochero, Escabeche, Cocido, Arroz Valenciana, Lechon and Ensaymada from Spain during three centuries of colonization. So did we absorb “pancit, batchoy, lumpia, Shanghai Fried Rice, bitso-bitso, taho, etc. into our cuisine since the Chinese have traded with us even before Magellan discovered the Philippines. Still the colonies can influence the conquerors as evidenced by the Dutch Reistaffel, a round table array of Indonesian dishes, a best seller in the eateries of Amsterdam.  

Chef Miller, chef owner of the Red Sage in Washington D.C. and Coyote Cafe in New Mexico while conducting culinary classes, he has discussed the bias and prejudice on Indian cuisine as compared with the “great” Italian and French traditions which make a big thing about sauces whereas to make authentic Indian curry from scratch, one would have to use as many as 25 different ingredients. “Can we teach how Oriental ingredients can be used in various Asian countries while controlling its acidic, pungent and aromatic elements?”

The sixth sense – the taste memory of a great chef

An experienced chef’s greatness is often evidenced by his or her development of a “sixth sense” when it comes to cooking. They have developed the ability to cook at the intuitive level. Susan Spicer’s acute sensory perception recounts, “I really developed my eye that I can l look at something and say ‘that needs rinsing off’ or that does not look fresh.’ I know when someone puts something in a sauté pan and it doesn’t make a noise that the pan wasn’t hot enough.

Learning taste distinctions through critical analysis and file knowledge from experience is what leading chefs refer to as “taste memory.” Sometimes people don’t have the experience or “taste memory.” They are inexperienced and get carried away with so many ingredients like a cacophony of notes that make bad music. Norman Van Eiken describes the process of maturation for a chef as “learning when not to hit certain notes. That’s the appropriate metaphor for what I felt that I was doing as a young cook. Now I am choosing the notes a lot more as opposed to just playing all the notes.”