DESIGN YOUR OWN RECIPES
Struggle with starting up your own recipes? Actually, the culinary art, like all kinds of art forms,
has its principles to establish a well-made play. A sophisticated recipe can also be
deconstructed into three parts and recomposed with the elements we need.
First, pick up the base we need. The role materials such as meats, vegetables, and seafood are
the usual base for all the cuisines in the world. They provide the mouth feeling of foods. During
cooking, these materials release small particle in stock or broth. We feel rich and tasty when
these small particles contact the physical sensors on our tongues. Furthermore, they also enrich
the body feeling of foods. Even if we can hardly smell their flavor directly, our posterior nasal
cavities have chemical sensors to detect the flavor and send a signal to our brains.
Second, add the salt with appropriate dosage. Cooking is simple if we know how many salts we
should add. Salt is a miraculous ingredient in the savory foods because it can enhance
sweetness, umami, and flavor of the foods by stimulating chemical sensors with sodium ions.
Without salt, we feel tasteless even though we use the most prized foodstuffs. However, our
humans have a very narrow preference for the concentration of salt, and it presents a similarity
between people from different cultures or countries. 0.5~1% for soup, and 1~3% for solid foods.
Both over or under dosage cause food inedible.
Third, choose the flavors. The flavors here mean the chemical detected by the sensor of the
nostril, and that is also of the first image of foods. Flavors define the style of foods, and all our
memories of specific cuisines are from the combination of flavors. Turmeric and cumin are easily
linked to curry, and the flavor of cooked soy sauce represent the Chinese or Japanese foods. We
have two sources of flavors; spices&herbs or Maillard reaction. the former can create the
unique attributes of dishes; the later can create the diversity from the same materials. The
composition of these two elements generates a colorful culinary art.
Preparing a meal with not only edibility but richness and diversity, the three steps provide you
with the fundamental perspective to design your own recipes as an artist. After we understand
the theory, the rest of it is our effort and creativity.