Salt of the Earth

My culinary education has helped changed my palate.....a lot. When I use to cook before I thought I knew what 'flavor' was. To me flavor was acheived by dumping mounds of seasoning on whatever poor piece of food you were preparing. I would make dishes that were covered in season salt, garlic powder, onion powder, crushed red pepper, and believe this was cooking at its finest.

When I actually began culinary school, there wasn't any season salt on the spice rack, or garlic and onion powder. If you wanted to add onion or garlic flavor to a dish, you added garlic cloves and sauteed onions. 

With my palate being handicapped by years of artificial flavorings and seasonings, at the beginning of schooling my dishes would suffer when it was time for grading. I could always pick up the techniques, and I could easily follow directions, but it seemed every time that I would present a dish the chef instructor would say "more salt".

I didn't really understand at the time what the Chef instructor meant. Visually taking a palm full of kosher salt seemed like enough to cause hypertension(upon measuring later on it only amounted to about a table spoon). Visually I couldn't see it, and at the time I couldn't even taste it.

One day we made shrimp bisque in class. Frustrated I decided that  I was going to take my dish, cook according to the directions, and finish with salt at the end, bit by bit while trying the dish. As added a hint more and more of salt I could taste the flavors improving. By the time I finished adding salt, I hadn't added a lot but I reached a point where the salt allowed me to taste EVERYTHING in the dish, the vegetables, bay leaf, tomato, butter, brandy, cream, stock..all of the flavors were accentuated by the salt. It actually got me to the threshold where I could to taste teh benefits of the different components in the dish.

When I presented it to my chef instructor he told me the shrimp bisque was "spot on", and told me to leave the dish so he could finish it.

Now I enjoy the simplicity of cooking. Kosher, sea salt, and crushed black pepper are my 'go to ingredients' with more of a focus of buying the top quality ingredients I can find, and cooking them properly. These components accentuate what you are cooking, not masking it.......

The Psychology of Eating

Food is vitality, food is exciting, food can be sensual, and intimate experience upon itself. There is so much in a dish that a chef thinks about, the minor details that could lead to a diner's enjoyment, such details a diner probably never even notices. Such details as rough chopping vegetables to create a "homey" dish to induce nostalgia in a diner, or giving a brunois or paysenne cut to add color and consistency to a dish, portion size and placement, everything that arrives in front of the diner has been thought of up to the inclusion or exclusion of a garnishment.

I think about these things being a young striving chef, as I work the grill at a hot spot in my town, I see an order for "well done" on a grassfed beef item.....I wonder, do people get it?

The psychology of eating....what makes somebody take a beautiful piece of meat, and burn it to the ground? Even with the education, sophistication, and compassion our country prizes itself on, why are so many parts of the animal typically going to waste because we won't eat tripe, tongue, ear, or head cheese?

What makes a diner drive past family owned restaurants that have preserved time tested recipes for generations, just to pull into Olive Garden?

And then as I cook the order of overcooked grassfed beef, I begin to think that maybe it's just me being a pompous ass. I grew up most of my life too asking for everything "well done", and asking for "medium well" when I felt adventerous. The idea of steak tartare or a medium pork chop would not even be entertained, but then I began to study the culinary arts and step out of my own comformity. And at times I feel my self becoming what I never wanted to be, an uppity foodie. But what I would like to do is open the diner's eyes to the possibilities of food when it is treated right. But it is hard to undue learned behavior, and the psychology of eating.