Flavor Cheat Codes

Cooking (at least cooking savory things that don't involve baking/leavening ingredients or food science techniques) as a whole is mostly a skill that doesn't rely on formulaic recipes but instead a feel for how something should taste, what it's lacking, and how to fix it.

The overall goal is to have a balance of flavors, but having something that ends up being too balanced is also not particularly delicious or memorable.. Therefore you need to have a single thing, or a combination of multiple things that form a coherent focal point, stick out.

You can accentuate the desired flavors by manipulating the basal taste sensations, which are sweetness/acid/salt/fat. "umami" is intentionally left out because i'll get to that later.

anyway, here are the flavor cheat codes:

>sweetness

pure maple syrup is easily the most versatile way to apply sweetness to anything.. everything from grits to pan sauces to marinades, salad dressings, glazes, whatever.

honey is a distant second but not really comparable.

>acid

sherry vinegar can be added to literally (L I T E R A L L Y) anything that tastes ok but not spectacular and it will make it taste spectacular; it's the thing you've always needed but never knew you weren't using.

>salt

salt, obviously. kosher salt.. kosher salt and also cured meats can work really well to achieve the same goal.

soy sauce/tamari is a close second, followed by miso as a slightly less versatile soy variation.

>fat

butter. butter is definitely the most superior form of fat. i mean, there are tons of great plant oils out there that have specific uses as well as tons of animal fats/tallow, but butter is hands down the most useful of them all.

discuss, and add to the list if you have any suggestions.

bump.. do you guys not wanna talk about cooking or something?

Looking for "secret weapon" ingredients is kinda silly. Of course butter and salt taste good. And acid wakes up boring food (though I'd favor lemon juice over sherry vinegar).

And it makes sense to balance flavors, but that need not happen within every dish. One diah can balance the other served with it. And if you're serving wine with the meal that alone will take care of the acid requirement. Putting each dish under a microscope for flavor balance within it seems short sighted.

my point is that these are things that you can use to "cheat" your way into making any dish taste good.

also i don't think you should rely on wine to complete a dish; it should compliment the dish it goes with unless it's integrated into the plate somehow

>my point is that these are things that you can use to "cheat" your way into making any dish taste good.

Not that guy but,
I do agree with you. So long as you don't focus on the "cheats" at the expense of technique.

IMHO a lot of people new to cooking don't realize that techniques add flavor just the same as ingredients do. They tend to focus on listing the ingredients rather than matters of technique, such as getting a good sear on the chicken. This kinda thing is great, so long as it doesn't overshadow or replace a focus on getting the techniques correct.

right.

you can't "cheat" your way out of a poorly executed dish, but these are things i use every day to take my food from "delicious" to "holy fuck".

Monitoring this thread for sure. This is the kinda stuff I always hope to see on Veeky Forums.

Huh?

I think the idea of "cheats" is a slippery slope. If salt and soy sauce are good why not try an OXO cube? If maple syrup and sherry vinegar are good why not use ketchup? Next thing you know your "cheat" dish becomes making chilimac with blue box dinner and a can of Wolf's.
>i don't think you should rely on wine to complete a dish
If you look at classic recipes from wine drinking cultures the acid component is often missing from dishes where it's just assumed they will be served with wine. This happens often in French food.

Good ingredients simply prepared do not require any cheats. The problem is getting your hands on good ingredients when food production is industrialized.

Yeah, agreed 100%.

An easy way to do this is to take a step back from some of our modern conveniences and use less refined ingredients.

Instead of using salt, use a product that is naturally salty, like soy sauce. I like to start many dishes with old-fashioned country ham as well. It renders out fat that can be used for later cooking steps, and it has a wonderful salty cured taste.
Instead of using MSG, use a more flavorful source of glutamates: fermented bean paste, hard cheeses, fish sauce.
And as you mentioned, instead of white sugar you can use various fruit juices, syrups, honey, and types of sugar that have not been refined as much (I like palm sugar and jaggery).

One thing I'd add to your list is regarding fats. You mentioned butter, but reserved animal fats are also fantastic. Bacon drippings, schmaltz (chicken fat), duck or goose fat, etc, are all very useful.

I'm with you on that one; a break from fast food and ground salt threads is awesome.

>Instead of using salt, use a product that is naturally salty, like soy sauce

Yeah.... or salt... you know since salt actually appears in nature....

>If salt and soy sauce are good why not try an OXO cube?

I think it comes down to how it is used, and whether or not it replaces a focus on technique like I mentioned earlier. To address this specific example: I do think that using a crushed oxo cube has benefits over simply adding salt. But replace actual stock with an oxo cube? No way. The cube lacks the gelatin and body of the stock.

>posting at 9am EST on a monday and expecting quick responses

>If salt and soy sauce are good why not try an OXO cube?

Why not? Or a Knorr Stockpot?

My point is that thinking in terms of "cheats" is a quick trip to using the kind of shortcuts that have degraded our food in the 20th Century - mixes, prepared this and that, artificially flavored this and that. If that's the kind of cooking you're doing you're really not doing much. But if you're stuck with supermarket tier ingredients and looking for yet another way to make chicken breast taste good it might be your only hope.
If you're starting out with good ingredients adding shit like that is just debasing them.

msg in this form

>Yeah.... or salt... you know since salt actually appears in nature....

I was referring to refined salts, like table salt or kosher salt, not straight-from-nature like gray sea salt, PHS, etc.

>My point is that thinking in terms of "cheats" is a quick trip to using the kind of shortcuts that have degraded our food in the 20th Century

Sounds like some kind of mental hangup. Don't get me wrong, I am 100% opposed to the kind of shortcuts you are describing. But nobody here is proposing shortcuts. They're suggesting exchanging a highly refined ingredient for one that is less refined. That's the opposite of the problem you describe.

>>If you're starting out with good ingredients adding shit like that is just debasing them.
Agreed. the problem is that it's very hard to get good ingredients these days.

>They're suggesting exchanging a highly refined ingredient for one that is less refined.
I'm not seeing that. Sherry vinegar is far more refined than lemon or lime juice, which would work better in some situations.

This seems more like a list of "secret weapon" ingredients, and that shit goes in and out of style pretty quick. A few generations ago Worcestershire sauce would have been on that list. Just over a decade ago it might have included flavored oils, Balsamic vinegar and Sriracha.

Not that there's anything wrong with your salt, acid or sweet component bringing its own set of flavors to the party. That can definitely add nuance to a dish. But it can also muddle up the flavors. Imagine putting Sherry vinegar, butter, maple syrup and soy sauce in the same dish. That would be a clusterfuck.

I'm of the opinion that balancing flavor is important, but leaning on magic bullet ingredients to do it is silly. Hell, I've known people who swore by truffle oil and liquid smoke.

I'm more in the seek out the best ingredients and prepare them simply camp.

>I'm not seeing that. Sherry vinegar is far more refined than lemon or lime juice, which would work better in some situations.

I do agree with your analysis here. I didn't make that example though. My points were from >7914308

Every substitution I was suggesting takes a highly refined ingredient and replaces it with a less-refined one. Or perhaps "refined" isn't the best term. Perhaps it would make more sense to say replace the "one dimensional flavor" with a more complex one?

To refer to your vinegar and lemon juice example, I would say:
replace white vinegar with a different kind of vinegar (sherry, cider, wine, black, etc, depending on the dish)
replace citric acid powder with citrus juice

>> I'm more in the seek out the best ingredients and prepare them simply camp.
I agree. Alas, it's not easy to get the best ingredients so it's nice to have some additional tools to use when needed.

I don't see this is as a "cheat" or "lol secret weapon", but more like: instead of using one-dimensional flavors, find something with more complexity. In a way it rejects modern conveniences and goes back to using natural sources of flavor.

Of course that doesn't work for every dish, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

>instead of using one-dimensional flavors, find something with more complexity.
I agree with this in principle, but that shit is not on my mind right now because it's summer, and that means all the fresh local produce is in where I live. When you're dealing with quality fresh ingredients in season you're not looking to add nuance to them. They already have it. Cooking becomes more an iossue of showing off their flavors without getting in the way of them.

But yeah, I think about adding nuance much more in the winter, when I have no choice but to shop at the fucking supermarket at least some of the time. The difference between a supermarket potato and the freshly dug ones sitting on my counter right now is really fucking striking.

OP here.. i live in the PNW so we have some of the best produce in the country at the moment. my point wasn't to use these ingredients heavy handedly, but they're amazing for accentuating what's already there to help take your food to new levels of deliciousness.

Onion powder. In. Everything.
except dessert

Pink Himalayan Salt is ridiculous. I remember it being amazing the first time I tried it, then the second time it tasted like regular salt. Would try again.

All, "simpler the better" aside. What's the occasion that calls for 'refined' tastes? A date? Overtime paycheck?
>On another note
I never enhance flavor, I just add flavor. Like when I use a hot sauce or the peppers in the sauce for a meal, I'm in favor of the taste (and heat), not the flavor enhancement.

>And are we not mixing up 'enhancing' with 'preserving'?
Yeah, these things enhance, but they also last a long time, and preserve the simpler taste.

I wouldn't exactly call this a cheat. To me the difficult thing is trying to understand what flavor would be best to add, not why to add to achieve that flavor.

Garlic Powder is the Elevator of food cheats

Best thread on Veeky Forums right now

I put tomato paste and espresso in my Japanese curry. Deepens the flavor like crazy. Good with a beefy flavor profile.
A good broth will be a game changer base too. Roast your bones, render your fat, brown your mirepoix, fuck the police.
Pic related. Cook your bones until they're ready to fall apart.

Butter may be the superiot form of cooked fat, but extra virgin olive oil is GOAT for cold dishes

I'm just going to randomly throw in some tips related to ingredients/substitutions in baking because, hey, I'm a baker and that's the shit I do.

You mentioned pure maple syrup; you can use that as a 1:1 substitute for vanilla extract in pretty much any recipe. You can also substitute many kinds of bourbon, 3 bourbon:1 vanilla. I use Jack Daniel's quite often because it's a young, sweet bourbon and because of certain esters it has a nice natural banana aroma in addition to the obvious caramel. Whiskey is also often cheaper.

If you see a recipe that uses sour cream, try substituting heavy cream with a tablespoon of vinegar/lemon juice in a 1:1 ratio. Especially cheesecake recipes.

Baking powder goes bad. Baking soda never goes bad. Bananas plus baking soda can be substituted for eggs, as can applesauce. Most people know this but it's very useful if you need to make something vegan that actually tastes good. Or you just lie and tell people it's vegan.

On extracts: I use vanilla extract 99.999% of the time, and once in a million years I'll actually use vanilla beans for something. This is the truth of restaurant baking.

Orange extract (and zest) is magical. Try swapping half your vanilla for orange in recipes where it seems appropriate.

Everybody knows that red velvet cake is basically chocolate cake with a ton of red food coloring. It's also made with buttermilk, and usually added acid which brings out natural red colors in cocoa. What many people don't know is that red velvet cake tastes way better with a cooked vanilla icing than the cream cheese icing most people associate it with.

Fuckups:
You can fuck up a carrot cake in an interesting way if you add your carrots and dry ingredient mix at the same time: baking soda reacts with carrots and will turn them green, resulting in weird green bits in your finished cake. Guess how I figured that out?

More Fuckups:

If you bake a cheesecake and it cracks really badly on top, then first of all you most likely have a shitty cheesecake recipe. You can glaze the top of the cake with chocolate or something similar. If that won't work, you can be particularly clever and turn it into a multi-layered cheesecake by leveling off the top, baking a second (better) cheesecake and putting the top half of the second cake on the first. A thin layer of ganache or something of the sort in the middle is a good idea to hold it all together. You might feel like a sellout at this point but this is how dreams are made, guys.

my cheats are putting msg in everything and browning anything that will turn brown

我的黑奴