Find Your Balance

I have had any number of anxieties about cooking, but what many of them boiled down to is this: the fear that I would cook something, and it wouldn’t taste right, and I wouldn’t know how to fix it. I’d plate food for myself and even for my partner and/or guests without having taken a taste of it first myself, a huge no-no. I would avoid that last minute taste, the one that could help me make the difference between bland and brilliant, because I simply didn’t know what to do if I didn’t like what I had tasted.

Samrin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking is as close as any recent cookbook has come to being a phenomenon. After it was released, I was seeing it and hearing about it — and Nosrat’s limited series for Netflix — everywhere. The title, really says it all, breaking down the experience of any dish into its constituent parts (to which I’d add texture, though all four of the elements in title can impact texture). When I taste a dish now, the first questions I ask myself are “Could it use salt? Could it use fat? Could it use acid? Could it use heat?” Salt brings out flavor; fat adds a luscious mouthfeel; acid adds brightness; and heat, such as a quick trip under the broiler, can brown food, crisp it, soften it, and more.

A few years ago, I went through a craft cocktail phase, hopping through the bars of DC for strange liquid concoctions with indecipherable ingredients, and practicing hard at home to make the best Manhattans and Gin Fizzes. My bible was Death and Co., a book produced by the cocktail bar of the same name located in New York. One of their recommendations for home bartending mastery was to take a simple drink and make it over and over again, each time tweaking the template just a little bit. In the book, their example is the daquiri, which in its traditional, non-frozen form is rum, lime, and sugar. If you swap in one rum for another, add or subtract lime, or use some other sweetener such as a liqueur, you start to learn how to make a drink that is perfectly balanced for your palate.

The same can be done in cooking. Even if you don’t make a dish over and over again, with many dishes, you can grab a portion, and add salt, or acid, or fat, or heat, and taste it to see how it’s changed. Not every disappointing dish can be fixed with a dash of salt or a squeeze of lemon, but learning to seek that perfect balance now helps me provide a last minute boost to something that hasn’t come out just right.