More Spice!

Star anise: a somewhat obscure spice.

A conversation about spices, especially about star anise, made me think about using some different spices than usual. I decided the star anise would be a good flavor for my planned main course for dinner tonight: pork chops browned with onion and braised with apple sauce. Experimentally, we dry-brined the chops for several hours with a light coat of salt and sugar before cooking. This did help the chops to become a very nice brown color with deeper flavor.

Tonight's salad of red cabbage and apples. I added another spice: candied ginger
as well as sherry vinegar and a little honey.

Maybe in the New Year I will be writing up one meal a week to document what I cook. Like this.

"Eight Flavors" in My Kitchen

Sarah Lohman's Eight Flavors in my kitchen. Left to right: soy sauce, MSG (in the form of Maggi seasoning), black pepper
(in the form of Rainbow peppercorns), garlic, chili powder (an old jar becuse I usually make it from scratch), curry powder,
vanilla, and Sriracha Hot Sauce.

 "The American kitchen is not static; it’s cumulative, and it evolves. Ten years ago, I had not heard of Sriracha, and now it is in every refrigerator I open (at least, those refrigerators stocked by millennials). And in the next decade, or the next century, our cuisine will continue to change. Which means a new flavor will earn a permanent place in Americans’ hearts and stomachs." Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine (pp. 221-222).

Author Sarah Lohman identifies herself as a historic gastronomist: that is, she explores the way that cooks worked in the past, and re-creates old recipes. The eight flavors in the title of her book provide a route into American cooking from Colonial times (when black pepper dominated both sweet and savory recipes) to the present, when we retain the earlier flavors but continue to add new ones. Specifically, Lohman describes how Sriracha, a hot sauce of southeast Asian origin and California manufacture, has spread throughout our kitchens.

In every chapter of this book, I learned new things about the flavor featured there. As illustrated in my photo, I use every one of these flavors in my own cooking -- some more than others. Especially interesting was the idea that wartime exposure to the foods of a region often results in flavors being brought back to the soldiers' home country. Is Sriracha partly due to experience in the Vietnam war? Well, maybe!

A few things I found especially interesting:

• Although careful well-executed studies have repeatedly found no ill effects from MSG, people still fear it and loath it! I think this is why Maggi seasoning doesn't explicitly name it on the label. The history of the discovery of the "fifth taste" -- umami is a fascinating one, and Lohman provides lots of insight into how adding MSG to food was at first a positive step, but became a problem because of a pervasive but mistaken view of the danger of this substance (which occurs naturally in many foods including human milk).
• Vanilla, I learned, was rare and expensive until some time in the nineteenth century. Before it became widely available, the flavor that was most used in sweets like cake or cookies was rose water! 
• Curry powder became popular long before Indian cuisine was well-known or served in restaurants. One chicken dish stands out -- "Country Captain Chicken is a common American curry dish that first showed up in Eliza Leslie’s 1857 cookbook Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book. It was a popular dish in port cities of the South, where Americans who had sailed to India would have lived and traded." (p. 92). 
• Garlic as a culinary flavor (rather than a medical remedy for many ills) became popular only in the twentieth century, as Italian-American food became mainstream and as French cuisine became well-known. "A clove of garlic, the part of the plant we cook with most often, is actually a leaf: a storage vessel that packs away energy for the next growing season. The energy stored in the cloves is in the form of sugar— specifically fructose— which is why a clove tastes sweet when it is cooked slowly and caramelizes when roasted." (p. 150).

Lohman's discussions of food history can be very intriguing. I was familiar with some of the history, such as the evolution of Italian-American food from the variety of Italian regional cuisines belonging to immigrants; the evolution of Chinese-American foods and thus the popularity of soy sauce; and the invention of chili powder and the role of the "Chili Queens" who sold a variety of Mexican street foods and thus popularized Tex-Mex cuisine. (I read about these areas in Hasia Diner's Hungering for America; Gustavo Arellano's Taco USA; and Haiming Liu's From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express -- blogged here, here, and here.)

My kitchen is pretty quiet these days, as I recently returned from a long trip and I haven't started cooking very actively to date. Reading this book gave me an opportunity to present a feature of my kitchen for the blogging event titled "In My Kitchen This Month," hosted by blogger Sherry. Quite a few very interesting posts have already been added to the April list!

Update, June 20, 2018. My culinary book club read this as our June selection. Everyone seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. Favorite sections included the one on vanilla, on black pepper, and on Sriracha.

"Flavor" by Bob Holmes

"We are the only species that seasons its food,
deliberately altering it with the highly flavored
plant parts we call herbs and spices." (p. 4)

"The notion that you can somehow “taste the soil” in a wine is completely false. Grape vines take up only water and simple nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, and calcium from the soil. They make all their more complex biomolecules— including the flavor volatiles— in-house. To put it more bluntly, none of the volatile molecules that determine a wine’s flavor come directly from the soil. ... Instead, a vineyard’s soil affects flavor indirectly, by altering how the vine grows and, especially, how quickly the grapes ripen." -- Bob Holmes. Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense (p. 216- 217). 

Flavor and how it's perceived: two fascinating concepts. Recently, neuroscientists and other researchers have been making remarkable progress in understanding our sensory perception of the volatile molecules in food and drink -- the elements that make flavors vary. Tomatoes, ripe strawberries, fake strawberry flavor, wine grapes, bitter vegetables, seared steaks, artificial chicken stock, and other foods are the subjects of Canadian journalist Bob Holmes' reporting.

As illustrated in the quote above, Holmes explores some of the myths about what we taste and how these tastes get into our food. I choose his discussion of wine -- only a small part of his book -- to illustrate how many revealing details he presents. His explanation of the actual role that soil quality plays in creating wine-grape flavor is something I've been hoping to learn for a long time. The same clone of a particular type of grapes does indeed yield wines of varied flavors -- the vines experience different degrees of stress which affect their sugar content and their flavor elements (mainly volatile chemicals).

The way the grapes are handled during and after the harvest is another surprising source of variation. Here's another quote that shows how this works:

"If you pluck a grape off the vine and chew it, you won’t notice much passion fruit flavor, because the thiol molecules haven’t formed yet— only their odorless precursors are present. The thiols themselves form during fermentation, as the yeast attack the precursors and split off thiol molecules. Rough handling of the grapes causes them to accumulate more of the precursors, so machine-harvested grapes yield wines with about ten times as much thiol as handpicked ones. This, incidentally, may be part of the reason that New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which is generally mechanically harvested, tends to have a much more pronounced passion fruit flavor than French sauvignon blanc, which is usually hand harvested. Even trucking the grapes from vineyard to winery leads to more thiols in the finished wine." (pp. 217-218). 

And finally, he writes about fermentation: "different yeasts can yield very different wines from the same juice. Winemakers are very aware of this, and put a great deal of thought into their choice of yeast." (p. 218).

Through most of the book, Holmes explains how human sensory apparatus enables people's widely varying response to foods. He shows not only the role of our taste buds and our olfactory system, but also other perceptions of food like how we hear it crunch and how it appears on a plate, and how the stinging and burning of chilies is perceived with our heat-and-touch sensors. He reports on a variety of studies that highlight the role of the context where we eat in how we respond to tastes -- even ambient lighting and noise.

The role of genes that control perception of volatile chemicals (the natural or artificial substances that account for varied flavors) seems to be a critical part of how human variation occurs. Genetics of taste is a study that's in its early stages and in some ways offers more confusion than clarity about how individual responses differ, according to Holmes' account of current research. "Clearly," writes Holmes, "the link among genes, taste perceptions, and actual food choices is not a simple one." (p. 41).

The difficulty neuroscientists encounter in analyzing the genetic component of taste arises for at least two reasons. One is that each person's experience with foods, especially in childhood, creates individual reactions to the various chemicals, so two individuals, despite having the same genes, can react differently anyway. Even so-called super-tasters don't all have the same response to the tastes they perceive. Further, the working of the taste buds and olfactory receptors differ for various taste elements in foods. For example, receptors for the so-called fifth taste, umami, are different from those for salt or bitter taste: "Our umami receptors max out at low intensity, so we’re physically unable to experience very umami in the same way we can taste very salty or very bitter simply by piling on the salt or brewing a cup of extra-strong espresso." (p. 25).

Holmes interviewed a very wide variety of experts including neuroscientists, agronomists, flavor scientists in commercial labs, and wine growers, among others. I have read several other books on the general topic of how humans perceive flavor and taste, including several books that were written by his interview subjects, or books that interviewed the same sources. As a result, I found some of the chapters a bit boring as I had read the same material before, often in much the same form. But on the whole it's a really great book, and its updates on the current state of science and technology of food, challenges to chefs who want to apply this science, and overall understanding of flavor and taste are wonderful!

"Stinky Feet Cheese"

For a long time, I have wondered about foods that are politely viewed as an "acquired taste." Or impolitely classified as "stinky" or worse, like the "stinky feet cheese" on the tables in an Italian restaurant that kids teased about when I was much younger.

Once you acquire a taste for Italian cheese or blue, ultra-strong coffee, Vegemite, caviar, fermented fish sauce, sauerkraut, raw blubber, peanut butter, or many other distinctive flavors, you might really savor them. But people who grew up with different tastes and different foods probably find your choices unappetizing or disgusting. I've been observing lately that certain tastes are really hard to acquire and they really disgust people who don't share them. It seems to me that these flavors are very frequently the result of fermentation -- Korean kim chee or British Marmite, for example.

A very wonderful book titled What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert offers an explanation into this question I've been thinking about. He says that acquiring these challenging tastes is a signal of belonging to your own national or ethnic group:

"Every culture has a foul-smelling food for membership. You are not really Taiwanese unless you eat 'stinky tofu' (chunks of fermented soybean curd). You are not really Icelandic unless you eat harkarl (rotten shark meat). Real Japanese eat natto (a gluey mass of fermented soybeans that smells like creosote). Then there is the fabulously stinky durian, or jackfruit, of southeast Asia. Singapore being Singapore, one is allowed to eat its sweet, custardy innards, but it is illegal to carry it on public transportation. I’m personally a big fan of kimchi, the national condiment of Korea. It’s made from fermented Chinese cabbage, garlic, fish sauce, and lots of red pepper. It packs a punch— a bottle of it once exploded in my refrigerator. Its postingestive consequences are spectacular: the humorist P. J. O’Rourke described them as 'a miasma of eyeglass-fogging kimchi breath, throat-searing kimchi burps, and terrible, pants-splitting kimchi farts.'" (What the Nose Knows, Kindle Locations 1634-1641).

Michael Pollan's book Cooked agrees with this idea, pointing out that "as much as a third of the food in the world's diet is produced in a process involving fermentation." He names "coffee, chocolate, vanilla, bread, cheese, wine and beer, yogurt, ketchup and most other condiments, vinegar, soy sauce, miso, certain teas, corned beef and pastrami, prosciutto and salami," and says "Fermented foods are typically both strongly flavored and strongly prized in their cultures." (p. 304) And he elaborates:

"What's curious is how culturally specific so many of the flavors of fermentation turn out to be. Unlike sweetness or umami these are not the kinds of simple flavors humans are hardwired to like. To the contrary, these are 'acquired tastes,' by which we mean that to enjoy them we often must overcome a hardwired aversion, something it usually takes the force of culture, and probably repeated exposure as a child, to achieve. The most common term children and adults alike will use to describe the fermented foods of another culture is some variation on the word 'rotten.' A wrinkle of the nose is how we react to both rottenness and foreignness. Many of these foods occupy a biological frontier -- on the edge of decomposition -- that turns out to be a well-patrolled cultural frontier as well." (Cooked, p. 309)

I like this explanation of acquired tastes very much, and feel as if it answers the question I've been pondering, about why people so often hate the fermented foods of other cultures than their own. And more generally, I've enjoyed reading both of these complex and fascinating books, which offer a vast number of insights about food, aromas, tastes, cooking, and chemistry. Obviously there's far more to learn from them than just what's in these brief quotes.

Also, by the way: the "stinky feet cheese" that my friends teased about when I was a kid -- it was grated Parmesan in a shaker. As I said, the local Italian restaurant where we encountered this cheese was the place where we were all also acquiring a taste for pizza. You might be astounded to hear that most of our parents had never tried pizza, so eating pizza was a sign of membership in our own adolescent peer group. That was long ago, now pizza is practically global.

Well, sort of global: millions of people in China think that ALL cheese is disgusting food for westerners and that the western diet makes them smell funny if not downright bad. Or as Pollan states it: the Chinese regard stinky cheeses "so disgusting as to be utterly incomprehensible as food." (Cooked, p. 369)

But the cheese in those shakers? By Italian standards, it was rancid from sitting out on the tables of the restaurant for ages after it had been grated. Real freshly-grated Parmesan isn't stinky like that at all. Or at least I don't think so -- maybe it wasn't rancid but I'm just used to it now. Tastes change, right?