The Flavor Star: How to Build Flavor for Amazing Meals
Never force yourself through a bland meal again! Learn how to build and balance flavor like the pros and start cooking the most delectable meals of your life.
In today’s episode, I’m covering the 5 main flavor profiles: salty / umami, sweet, sour, bitter, and spice. Most of us are just following recipes when we’re in the kitchen, but if you develop an understanding of flavor and how it is created using a wide variety of ingredients, you’ll be free to go off-roading and become much more confident tinkering with recipes (or even creating your own!).
As a recipe developer, I am always thinking about how to create meals with deep flavor, which often utilizes ingredients across several flavor profiles to deliver a more interesting tasting dish. I’ll be passing this knowledge and these flavoring skills onto you so that you can have more fun in the kitchen, too.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- The concept of “The Flavor Star,” and how flavor profiles balance and enhance one another.
- The ingredients you can use to create each flavor profile. We’ll be going well beyond the basics of salt, sugar, lemon juice, and pepper.
- We’ll dissect a few recipes to understand how different ingredients contributed to its flavor profile.
Have a listen and become a flavor star! You’ll even get to hear me sing a few tunes in this one!
REACH OUT:
If you’ve got questions you want us to answer in a future episode, comments about a previous episode, or just want to say hi and share some love, give us a call at 1-650-386-0290 and leave us a voicemail. You might just hear your voice on the podcast!
Love from our podcast community:
“We discovered Cook Smarts when my husband and I were first starting to work full time and needed something better than the 5-10 dishes we were making over and over again. Cook Smarts has really shown us how to experiment with different foods and dishes and we love the flexibility of it! Now with this podcast, we have a nice, easily digestible way to get more tips for the kitchen! It has been wonderful to hear the insight and I send podcasts all the time to my husband to listen to as well. Thank you for providing this new avenue to reach people — love what you do!
– trextolf
Subscribe & review in your podcast player
Help us continue to put these info-packed episodes together by subscribing to “In the Kitchen with Cook Smarts” in your podcast player and giving us some stars. If you really love us and want to be a super supporter (and we hope you do!), please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, too. If we share your review in a future episode, we’ll send you a Cook Smarts tote bag to bring you more fun and eco-friendly grocery shopping!
trextolf, thanks for the great review above and make sure to reach out to us at hello@cooksmarts.com so we can ship a new tote to you.
And of course, if you know someone who wants to improve their cooking knowledge and add more flavor to each meal, please pass along this episode to them!
Links mentioned in this episode
Get more helpful cooking tips and resources by signing up for our newsletter below. We send out weekly emails that will help you improve in the kitchen and live a healthier life, so join our community today and start cooking smarter!
