http://gigliocooking.blogspot.com/2018/02/if-you-really-want-to-learn-how-to-cook.html
in date February 27, 2018
In the post of the link above is the experience of a “seafood” evening: an endless array of seafood.
This is how you learn the difference in flavor and consistency between scampi, prawns, crab, mantis shrimp and all crustaceans; the difference between the varieties and sizes of clams, mussels, oysters and all shellfish; the difference in taste, thickness, contrast of sweetness and salinity between caviar, sea urchin roe, bottarga; the textures and flavors of the various fish, cephalopod molluscs. And then the algae, the sea salts…
At Gigliocooking it happens, during the lessons, to have tastings:
- of honey: acacia, millefiori – different according to the seasons -, asphodel, bramble, ivy, sulla, sunflower, chestnut…
… of strawberry tree – bitter and with waves of flavor that roll on the tongue until it becomes sweet
- of extra virgin olive oils: the various Tuscans, always different and surprising and the other oils of our peninsular tradition
- of Pecorini Toscani: but how many are there? ripe, fresh, matured in chestnut leaves, in pomace, under the ashes, on resinous pine wood shelves….
- and many other products.
Savoring means taking the time to scan a flavour: passing a mouthful over the taste buds dedicated to a specific base, splitting the complex taste into rivulets – the basic flavours: sour, bitter, sweet, salty, umami – and then making them fluctuate again with the other doodles of basic flavors until it becomes “our” complex flavor again: the one that evokes memories or fixes a new experience in our memory.
It is funny. It is the correct use of a gift we have been born with and of the tools to implement it: teeth, taste buds, saliva, smell receptors, glutamic acid which brings sensations to the brain.
Not using them means rejecting a gift.
Not using them means not letting our body’s machine work and making it forget how to use them.
Not using them or also, eating wrong, eating too salty or with too much sodium glutamate means making our system unlearn how to produce the substances that make us distinguish flavors.
Savoring means then being able to combine the right and specific variety of product to obtain an optimal result: chestnut honey with Tuscan pecorino; William pear with gorgonzola; lobster with blueberries; leccino and frantoiano oil with Verna wheat bread with germ; Biova bread with Garda oil; champagne with caviar…
… hazelnut with white truffle.
Going even deeper: the tonda gentile hazelnut from Piedmont, very oily and sweet, to make Nutella; the Giffoni hazelnut to grind to make shortcrust pastry…
… the globular aubergine for the parmigiana; the bitterish long aubergine for the caponata, the violet aubergine, with its white, firm and sweet pulp to make cakes and mousses.
Spices, aromatic herbs: what creates the magic and enhances the dish: do you know them? how many and which ones can you distinguish in the photo?
You don’t learn everything in a day or even in a month. It takes time and you have to believe in it.
It has become my goal: to make people understand what food is in a world that seems to have forgotten it. I’m romantic and old-fashioned: but I believe that understanding food can save us…from many things.
Marcella Ansaldo © 2023