BUILDING FLAVOR, BODY AND TEXTURE: PART 10
In addition you can sharpen your own sensory awareness. Experiment with seasonings and become aware of their effects on flavor. Start working with very small amounts of seasonings until your product tastes good. Then try a little more. It may taste even better or it may be ruined. But you won't recognize its ultimate flavor until you've gone beyond it.
But, you may say; people's tastes differ. Indeed they do. This is why the word "ought" is in quotes. Who decides? Do you please the good cook whose product you first tasted, the customer, or yourself?
The answer is that you strive to please the customer. To do this you must learn to know the customer's taste in tastes. Every culture has preferences in food taste. Every area of the country has preferences. Southerners, for example, like heavily seasoned dishes. Parts of the Midwest and North prefer mild or subtly seasoned foods. You can learn to know your customers' tastes by watching their reactions to the foods you serve. Knowing customer tastes is one of the most important skills a cook can develop.
Then you must put aside your personal preferences and give the customers what they want, not what you want them to have. It is not easy to learn this—to use your own sense of taste to season to someone else's taste. It takes experience and practice.
Making a food taste the way a customer expects it to taste is seasoning at its indispensable minimum. Making that same food taste better than the customer's highest expectation is achieving the ultimate in taste. Foods with the ultimate in flavor are bound to have comeback appeal.
Flavoring and flavorings
Flavoring adds a complementary flavor to a dish at the end of its preparation. It creates a blend in which both the original flavor and the added flavor are identifiable, as in the addition of black pepper to a green salad.
Most flavorings are products with distinctive tastes, capable of holding their own in a dish. For example, wines, brandy, cognac, and other spirits are often added as flavorings at the end of cooking. Sherry is a popular American flavoring for sauces. Wine or brandy is often poured over a dish and flamed—set afire—at the time of service. This adds some flavor but is done more for show.
In such dishes as sauces, wines and spirits may be added during cooking to become part of the total flavor. They are then flavor builders rather than flavorings. The same product can play one role in one dish and another in another.
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