Improve Any Dish With One Ingredient
Food writer and Eater editor-in-chief Helen Rosner has the simplest ingredient secret advice in the entire culinary world:
Transforming a dish with one new ingredient feels magical, as if you were the Ratatouille ratgnawing a large piece of cheese and strawberries . This inspires some people to carry hot sauce or signature salt mix with them . This is especially gratifying for those of us who grew up with the tasteless flavors of the Midwest.
Other versatile add-ons include:
- Savory dishes: hot sauce or chili powder for heating; fish sauce for salinity and umami; MSG (if you agree it’s safe ) for umami
- Sauces: a pinch of sugar to balance the astringency
- Rice dishes: sesame oil for flavor enhancement
- Mexican / South American Cuisine: Lime (as a climate-adapted lemon alternative).
- Vegan Meals: Nutritional Yeast for Nutrients and Umami; smoked peppers to add smoky bacon
But above all, salt and lemon. In his cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat writes, “Salt has a greater effect on flavor than any other ingredient.” She talks about a cook who added three slides of salt to Nosrat’s polenta. She was horrified, but tasted it: “The corn was something sweeter, and the butter was richer. All tastes were more pronounced … No matter how hard I tried, the word salty did not fit. “
Nosrat’s favorite acid is vinegar; she has a similar story of adding vinegar to carrot soup, fearing it would turn into a “sweet and sour nasty” but finding that it brought out the aromas of “butter and vegetable oil, onion and broth, even sugar” and the minerals in carrots. ” … However, it does leave room for the last-second acid kick from freshly squeezed lemon, lime or orange. “Volatile aroma molecules dissipate over time,” which is why a lemon in a restaurant snack is served on a plate for you to shrink.
Rosner recommends fresh lemon in his excellent soup recipe called Roberto , which is written for inexperienced chefs and has descriptions such as “[Sausage] should look speckled with dark spots, like a leopard or a cute dog.”