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Last year, I took a chef friend to a Japanese restaurant. After the meal, we talked about the different flavors of horseradish. It was the kind of elevated chat you’d want to hear after dinner from a star-ranked restaurateur. A month later, I sat down with the same chef at an Ethiopian restaurant and we were entranced by a combination of flavors we couldn’t recognize or interpret. In fact, it was the balance of flavors, with no one dominating, that excited us most.
I’ll be honest, I find this a strange contradiction – two men indulging in a Jesuit-like debate about a single flavour, and then all but succumbing to a blanket, indiscriminate plundering of taste – but it really got me thinking.
Recently, I received my regular lecture from my nerdy daughter about the contrasting styles of cyberhacking—specifically, the difference between logical, methodical code-breaking and what she calls “brute force”—writing code that will unlock a billion random combinations in the time it takes me to find a calculator.
We were dining at our favourite local curry house. “A systematic approach is more elegant,” she said, “but brute force is just as effective. It’s a bit like the taste of this sauce: you don’t know what’s in it, but you just throw stuff in and… if it works, it’s fine.” I love this. I love the idea of a chef applying all the rigour of Bletchley Park to sensory codes and ciphers. But I really love the idea of cooking by brute force.
Certain things are evidence of forceful cooking techniques: loads of garlic. Deadly chili heat. But so is slow cooking or copious amounts of oil. They either physically overwhelm the palate or, equally, mellow and bring flavors together.
In a Japanese meal, one is expected to savor the purity of a single bite of raw fish with barely any garnish, but the emphasis on dashi and soy sauce in probably the majority of dishes, along with the common additions of mirin, sugar, garlic, and ginger, make this unmistakably “Japanese” in a symbolic way, not just a heavy-handed way. (On a completely unrelated rant, let’s not talk about pimentón; we’ve adopted it as our “Spain” cucumber, and that should stop.)
Think of all the spice mixes you’ve bought: ras el hanout, secret barbecue spice blends, cheap “curry” powders or authentic masalas, shichimi, badouban, quatre épices, five-spice, nine-spice, a thousand different Thai and Vietnamese pastes. They’re all unique and highly impressive, but if one ingredient was missing or substituted, you’d never know. I have a pot of mole in my freezer from a street market in Oaxaca that contains over a hundred ingredients, and I’m prepared to admit that if a grasshopper was missing, I’d never notice. It’s a kind of gastronomic complexity theory: the more ingredients there are, the more reproducible and amazing the result is.
So there are some dishes that have historically been considered aggressive, even if simplified. Most of what we think of as Indian food has an aggressive approach. A lot of Southeast Asian food, with its traditions of tasting sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami in every bite, has an aggressive approach. But most cuisines have a bit of both.
Take French cuisine, for example. Traditional dishes like cheese soufflé and sole meunière are pretty pure and simple. Cassoulet, on the other hand, is a masterful mix of absorbent beans tossed with French-style spiced racks and simmered for a long time. Since its invention, five towns have fought over the composition, and there is still no official recipe.
These broad flavor combinations are simultaneously recognizable and distinctive, yet frustratingly imprecise in their construction. Out of chervil? Know its horrifying secret? No one will notice. Perhaps this is why chefs at the highest level don’t serve up brute-force dishes: When fine-tuning no longer makes a difference, the dish is out of their control.
Brainstorming doesn’t just stop at ingredients, it extends to the actual cooking. I’m thinking specifically about low-and-slow cooking techniques, which remove a lot of the volatile components from most flavorings and then blend what’s left. I often write “refrigerate overnight to let flavors blend” in recipes; it’s such a staple technique in my repertoire now that we build our menus around it. Would I be crazy to serve beef cheek ragu the same day I make it?
Writing in the UK, there is inevitably a class element to all this. We see the ability to identify and distinguish flavours as a skill acquired by a “connoisseur” (literally “one who knows”). It takes a “cultured palate” to pick out individual flavours and detect nuances; it’s a sign of “refinement”. Meanwhile, supposedly brute-produced foods, often from “peasant” roots, we see them as crude, clumsy and inelegant. They are low-status foods and it is inappropriate to value them.
But brute force cooking is what gives me the most immediate and pure pleasure in a restaurant, so I don’t think it’s a bad strategy for eliciting deliciousness. Brute force cooking can be just as effective as learned precision cooking, but it requires deeper emotion, perhaps an immersion in tradition. It also requires intuition, a certain amount of trust, and the abandonment of overly precise control.
Follow Tim Tim Hayward Please email tim.hayward@ft.com
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