What are the Basic Principles of Combining Flavors?

Can you be more specific?  Your question is very vague and ope ended, much along the lines of "how was the universe created?"

 Posted by Philip Terry 

Depends what you're trying to do.  A "sweet and sour" or "gastrique" can pull you strongly in two directions at once, but require balancing one against the other.  A mellow cognac/cream sauce will barely pull at all.  A good vindaloo will be very vinegary, without any balance other than heat.

Depends on what you did.

Yes or no.  Have they?

BDL

It might help if you took a gander at: "Culinary Artistry". Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-28785-7

There are basically 4 register on your taste buds.  They are sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.  Sometimes these tastes are used to flavor a dish... meaning you want to them perceived.  Other times they are just added to balance the dish and the individual flavors are not perceived.

Sweetness can be added to a dish to round it out.  Sweetness satiates the appetite which makes sense with desserts.  It can work with all of the other tastes and even bring out more flavor on certain ingredients.  Examples: chocolate covered pretzels (sweet and salty), gastrique/agrodolce (sweet and sour--very common), craisins (sweet and bitter).

Salty flavors are probably the most important in balancing and extracting flavor from savory food.  It stimulates the appetite.

Sour flavors brighten a dish and are important for balance.  A little acid can take a heavy dish more pleasing--very important these days as psychologically people are very concerned with health and a squeeze of lemon can often be the difference between greasy and delicious.  In the forefront sour flavors can work in both sweet or savory dishes.

Bitterness is also important in balance. It works against sweetness, hence why bitter foods like chocolate and grapefruit are often balanced with sugar.  In savory cooking, bitterness is terrific at cutting the richness in a dish... which is why bitter foods nearly always go well with dairy.  Examples: coffee, cranberries, beer, arugula.

There is much more to take into account including temperature and texture which I personally like to mix within a dish.  Also spiciness and foods with a cooling effect (cucumbers, mint, or coconut) can be balanced with each other although neither is considered a basic taste.  Psychological factors matter as well.  A rich dish would be great right now but would be terrible on a 100 degree day in August.  Its a lot to take into account but professionals do all of this often without even thinking about it.  Hope that did something for you.

You forgot "umami". 

Umami is confusing to explain and although it is a real taste its also kind of in its own category as far as flavoring strategy.  I'll leave it to someone who knows more than me... which is that MSG rules.

You forgot "umami". 

It's not so much forgetting it, Iceman, as identifying it.

Umami is not a distinct flavor characteristic, in the sense that salt, sweet, bitter, and sour are. That's what makes it so confusing.

When I was coming up, we said there were five "flavors:" sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and savory. Umami is the Japanese word for what we called savory, and it's a characteristic of certain foods that includes bringing out the full flavor of the other tastes, providing a sort of mellow mouthfeel, and, in general, making food taste better. Some foods just naturally do this better than others---mushrooms, soy, fish sauce, many traditional condiments, etc---and are said to have umami.

The ability of making foods taste better, taste more like themselves, is found in many places. Plain salt is the classic case. If you add salt to any dish (assuming amounts less than it takes to make it taste salty) and compare it to the same dish without salt, you immediately taste a difference. MSG is often touted for this purpose as well.

 Umami is merely that idea carried to the ultimate.

Umami or Yeasty flavors help in rounding out the savory notes in an item.  When making sauces you can use things like fish sauce, soy sauce, konbu or dehydrated shiitake mushrooms to bring out the naturally occuring savory notes rather than using salt.  Parmesan cheese is an excellent source of Umami and can be that mystery flavor when used in small quantities that makes people scratch their heads trying to figure out what you did to give it that nice round "brown" flavor. 

I agree with whoever that is and feel the same way about temperature as well.

Well keep in mind bitterness is just the taste, but not all bitter foods have the same flavor.  Bitter melon is a real ingredient and behind all that bitterness has real flavor.  Preparations I know of are consistent with the theories above in combining bitter foods with rich dishes.  Bitter melon is often served with yogurt, oyster sauce, peanuts, and coconut milk... all pretty rich.  I don't think I've seen bitter melon sweetened before but it does sometimes take the edge off of a bitter food.

Spiciness isn't actually a taste in the taste bud sense but there is a small juggling act to be done here too as certain peppers have terrific flavors.  Jalapeno's are divine and pretty trivial to make palatable for even those who can't handle their capsaicin.  A better example is a habanero that has an incredible flavor but is generally so spicy that it masks its own flavor and is not enjoyable to most.  A great technician knows how everything pops in your mouth and can make it so that the flavor comes before the heat.  But as a balancing exercise in the home, if the heat in a dish gets away from you.  You can always serve it with coconut rice.

You're using a lot of sommelier talk right now.  In cooking you have more control.  You don't have to look for flavors, you can put them in.  In general you decide which flavors you want to come through and plan the whole way.  Lets pick an example with soup since it takes away a lot of the x-factors.  Its cold here so we're going with a nice seasonal butternut squash soup.  Now my goal already is to make butternut squash taste as much like a butternut squash as I can.  Really bring out the best in it.  To do this I know from experience that squash is going to need salt and its going to want some sweetness.  Other things like allspice, and bay leaves help a squash taste more like a squash so I'm going to work them in but you won't know they are there.  I want other flavors as well, bacon, a little heat, some onion, and definitely sage.

First I'd saute my bacon in the bottom of my soup pot.  Bacon will pop right through the flavors I'm choosing so it'd be a real shame not to take advantage of that.  Then add an onion when some bacon fat is rendered.  Onions will soften and give me some more of that sweetness I'm looking for.  Next I'll add my squash in cubes and saute that a while, this will caramel things up a bit and sweeten my dish.  Next I'll add chicken stock, allspice, bay leaves, sage, salt, and white pepper.  White pepper is important as otherwise this could just taste like pumpkin pie soup.  It chains this dish into the realm of savory food.  Simmer for a time, fish out the bay leaves, blend, adjust the texture, and start balancing the dish.  How much more salt/sweetness can this dish handle before it tastes salty and/or sweet?  If I'm unsure about adding sweetness I might drizzle the soup with cream sherry during service to leave pockets of extra sweet in an otherwise uniform bowl.  I might decide to top with toasted bread crumbs for some contrast of texture.

Philip, you have just been provided a complete tutorial on the subject in four succinct paragraphs. And Ben didn't even charge you for it.

But note one thing: Despite all the science, despite all the theory, it boils down to understanding, on a real-world level, how flavors combine with each other to achieve a desired goal. And most of that requires time in grade. The only way you really know how X amount of sage effects a dish is to make it that way.

Personally, I think Slater tended to get carried away. But his basic concept is sound: textural balance is just as important as the rest. Which is why I would float a few roasted pumpkin seeds in Ben's soup, to add a little crunch factor and provide a visual break.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KYHeirloomer 

Philip, you have just been provided a complete tutorial on the subject in four succinct paragraphs. And Ben didn't even charge you for it.

 

But note one thing: Despite all the science, despite all the theory, it boils down to understanding, on a real-world level, how flavors combine with each other to achieve a desired goal. And most of that requires time in grade. The only way you really know how X amount of sage effects a dish is to make it that way.

 

Personally, I think Slater tended to get carried away. But his basic concept is sound: textural balance is just as important as the rest. Which is why I would float a few roasted pumpkin seeds in Ben's soup, to add a little crunch factor and provide a visual break.

I agree completely.  You'd hate to do all that work and end up with a bowl of baby food.

Every cuisine has a slightly different philosophy on combining flavors.

And it seems to me that flavor balance has some drift too with things coming in and out of style. Sweet and salty being popular right now for example. Salted caramel and that sort of thing.

OK. Let me explain this a little bit. I only added this comment because benway made such a nice effort in his post before explaining what he did. I was just throwing in a tiny bit of humor, apparently lost on this audience, and really nothing more. I personally think it a kinda stupid word. I hate TV cooking competition show judges who never let an episode go by without using it. I can't stand 98.6% of them in the first place. I was just making a joke. Sorry. 
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by IceMan 

You forgot "umami". 

When I am developing products for customers I will often times use different acids in formulation depending upon what else is in the seasoning.  Citric acid (like the lime you used) is often used as a "top note" as well as a flavor enhancer when working with strong flavors.  For cheese and foods that contain lots of cheese try using items that have lactic acid, it brings out the flavor or the cheese itself without working against the other flavors and finally when using fruits and mild flavors try using some apple juice ( great source of Malic acid) as a flavor enhancer.  These will all "brighten" the overall flavors of the dish without over powering or killing the nuances of other flavors.  Remember, its always easy to add a little more to the dish than take it away so use them a little at a time.

Yes.  Different methods of cooking the same things result in different textures and tastes.  Asking for a complete description of the differences is asking too much.  10,000 words couldn't give you the amount of knowledge that a couple of chickens and two hours of experimentation would. 

There aren't real, comprehensive answers to the questions you're asking in this thread, because the questions themselves are overly broad.  In essence, you're asking for a book.

The physiology of flavors is complex, involving the taste bud, palate and nose.  How you manipulate them -- and at bottom, that's what you're doing -- can be still more complex or quite simple.  So far the descriptions of taste bud receptors as sour, sweet, salty, and bitter -- plus umami, is still incomplete.  Although not one of the specific papillae, HOT! is also a primary sensation occurring on the tongue.  When you consider the way palate and purely aromatic stimuli affect the way the brain interprets the taste signals, you've got an awful lot of stuff going on.  Then add texture. 

The idea of "balance" is very important, so are "depth of flavor," "layering," "brightness," and a score (at least) of other things.  You use your experience with flavors, techniques, and your virtual palate (what I call the ability to imagine and predict tastes) to begin the creative processes of developing a new dish or "reverse-engineering" something prepared by some else.

You're questions are interesting, but premature in the sense that you lack the culinary and scientific expertise for the answers -- if anyone could give them -- to make sense.  Make your questions more specific to dishes you've actually cooked or would like to cook, and you'll start to see the general rules emerge from the welter of specifics and exceptions.  At the moment it's like talking to someone who's just started his first algebra class, asking how to solve three-body, gravitational problems.   

The more specific you are, the more likely you are to get meaningful answers. 

BDL