Choose the Best Ingredients

No matter what food you eat, there are two basic ways to put flavor on a plate:

1. Choose the best ingredients.

2. Use flavor-building techniques.

With ingredients, everyone has the same playing field—from professional chefs to home cooks. Choose the best-tasting food from the start and you’re on your way to a great-tasting dish. When you can, buy local, seasonal, and organic. Shop your local farmers’ market or healthy food store. Make sure the food is ripe, plump, and bursting with color and flavor. Of course, in a pinch, ingredients like frozen corn, peas, and butternut squash are fine, as are pre-cut vegetables like spiralized zucchini and pre-chopped carrots from the produce section of the store. Just keep in mind that flavor dissipates as soon as food is cut. For the absolute best flavor, buy whole foods and prepare them in your kitchen when your motivation is high. Practice your knife skills!

Go Easy on Adding Processed Sugar, Salt, and Fat

If you choose food wisely, your ingredients should taste good on their own without many—or any—enhancements. Then comes the real fun of combining ingredients and layering on the flavors. That’s where creativity happens! Use a light hand with the sugar, salt, and fat. These three ingredients alone are linked to most of the health problems plaguing us today—from heart disease and high blood pressure to diabetes and obesity. It’s not hard to see why. They taste great! In fact, we all need these ingredients in our bodies. Sugar provides calories for energy and is present in some form in nearly every food. Sodium is essential for keeping every cell in your body functioning properly. And fat keeps your nervous system running smoothly. Fat also helps you absorb fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, and E, and health-boosting nutrients like beta-carotene, lycopene, and lutein. We’re kind of “hard-wired” to like the taste of sugar, salt, and fat. Food manufacturers know this simple fact. They tend to pile on the sugar, salt, and fat to make you crave their food products so you buy more.

We’re not saying that all our recipes are sugar-free, salt-free, and fat-free. We use these ingredients—sometimes to wicked effect! The key thing to remember is that sugar, salt, and fat are highlight flavors in food—flavor enhancers, not substantial nourishment. When using sugar, salt, and fat in your cooking, think of them more like the special effects in a movie. You want a little sis-boom-bah here and there, but that’s not the plot. Great-tasting beans, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits are the main story. Put those front and center.

If your taste buds have developed strong cravings for sugar, salt, and fat, then it’s time to step back and start tasting real food again. Try a reset. Eat clean for a few days. Then buy a good-quality locally grown carrot in season, in the late spring or mid-fall. Eat it, unadorned. Taste it as you chew. You’ll notice there’s already quite a bit of sugar in a carrot. That is step 1 to understanding how to build flavors and how to season your food. Taste it!

Most foods already contain some sugar, salt, and fat—there’s no need to automatically reach for those flavor enhancers. Taste as you go and try to save the sis-boom-bah for the end. The cook’s process of seasoning and adding other ingredients is merely a matter of balancing the overall taste and texture of the foods you’re working with.

Avocados are a good example. The average Hass avocado has 15% fat, 0.3% sugar, and 0.008% sodium. All that fat makes it taste rich and creamy. It’s so low in sodium, however, that it tastes a bit bland. Maybe we sprinkle on a little salt at the end of prepping an avocado dish to balance the overall flavor. Or better yet, skip the salt, but add a whole-food source of sodium like olives or capers. Yum.

Tomatoes, another good example: The average tomato has only 0.2% fat and 0.005% sodium, with 3% sugar. If the tomato is ripe, it won’t need any added sugar. It needs richness, though. Maybe you drizzle on a little olive oil and a pinch of salt to balance its natural flavors. Or, thinking back to the last example, avocados are a healthy source of fat, yet low in sugar. Maybe you combine the tomatoes with the avocados. Tomatoes bring sugar, avocados bring fat, and you could add in some olives and capers for sodium. Now you’ve got a tasty little salad going. No added sugar, salt, or fat needed!

Most chefs taste a dish multiple times so they know what seasonings to add along the way. That’s cooking.

Hit All the Other Flavor Buttons

There’s a lot of flavor to be had outside of sugar, salt, and fat. In fact, we perceive five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (or umami, as the Japanese call it). Notice that sugar and salt account for only two of those basic flavors. Sour is another basic taste that’s wicked important. Sour flavors come in the form of acids in food, like the sharp tang of lemon juice and tart apples, or the puckery taste of sherry vinegar and red wine. Sour flavors are often overlooked in cooking. You should be adding them as a key element in most of your dishes. Adding a sour flavor can help a dish “pop” and balance all the other tastes in it—especially when you’re cutting back on salt. Acidity can also be very subtle, like when you deglaze a pan with some wine and then simmer it off, leaving behind notes of acidity and sweetness.

Bitter is the tongue-tightening taste of bitter greens like arugula and broccoli rabe as well as certain beans like coffee and unsweetened chocolate. Bitterness will come naturally, and you’ll probably be adding other ingredients to tame the bitterness—like adding soy sauce to bitter greens. Yes, salt (or in this case, soy sauce) tames bitterness. Fat can also dull the sharp taste of bitter foods.

The fifth taste, savory or umami, is the mouth-rounding flavor of things like mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes, seaweed, and soy sauce. It’s hard to describe: a little funky, a little earthy, and a lotta awesome. It gives you a total mouthgasm! (This is now a word.) This savory flavor is another basic, satisfying taste that helps to round out all the other flavors in a dish. Most vegetables have a savory element to them. If you need to immediately bump up the umami in a dish, add some mushrooms, mushroom powder, soy sauce, nutritional yeast, or seaweed like nori or dulse.