F is for Flavor | Culinary Boot Camp Day 1 | Stella Culinary School

my name is jacob burton i'm the executive chef of stella restaurant and the cedar house sport hotel and real quick before we jump into our week-long adventure uh i want to give you a little bit of background of what we're going to be doing here this week and how this all came about so let me tell you a little story about about how a coconut macaroon changed my life i when i first met my wife and we were dating we'd been together for about four months her favorite treat was the cocoa macaroon and at that point i was a decent cook i hadn't gone to culinary school i didn't know that much about cooking i had maybe 10 dishes that i could that i was comfortable with that i could that i felt that i could serve to people and they would enjoy if they came over to eat um but i was i could follow recipes you know um so that was basically what i was capable of doing in the kitchen so one day i'm at home it's my day off and i'm watching the food network and they got some making a coconut macaroon and they're like oh yeah it's real easy it's mixed together you fold the ingredients you mold it you put it on the little pan you press the bake button 15 minutes later it's all good right and they show you the money shot at the end where they break over the coconut macaroon you're like oh that looks awesome yeah great i can do that so i go online i go to the website where you know they refer you at the end of the show like go to this website check this out you know make this recipe so i make it it comes out horrible it's disgusting i'm like man like you know i i miss something i don't bake that much i i screw up the recipe okay so i make it again and then the second time it doesn't come out i'm like oh okay so i'm gonna make it one more time so i make it a third time third time i follow the recipe to the tea double check everything i mean literally it took me about 30 minutes just to mix the ingredients because i was double checking everything right third time was awful and i remember the rage that i felt i mean i was literally i was in rage i felt betrayed they gave me a bum recipe right uh i wasted half of a day trying to make coconut macaroons which by the way i don't even like you know i was i thought i was doing it for my girlfriend who i wanted to impress and they didn't give me the tools to troubleshoot so i felt very intellectually insulted you give me a bum recipe you don't explain to me why you mix ingredients while you bake it like this and now your bum recipe is useless because i don't even i don't even understand like how do i fix this so literally i went to culinary school the next week well i signed up the next week and i was in college i was bored you know so i was like oh you know whatever let's take a dive off the cliff and see where this leads us well it led me to my philosophy of technique is king understanding of food is king uh because cooks whether you're a professional cook in the kitchen just starting out or you're a cook at home you're so dependent upon recipes on other people's recipes and if you do enough of the same recipe time and time again you build this intuition the sense for it and then you can start to make it your own but once you have a deep technical understanding of that recipe then you can create your own recipes so what i have here is the f-step curriculum it's a curriculum that i've formulated specifically to brainwash you to make you think like a chef to kind of break that mold of hey i want to i want to cook beef berg and yellow tonight so i need to go find the beef burger in your own recipe in one of my 100 cookbooks it's like no i understand fundamentally what beef burgundy own is the technique behind it and what makes it good and also when it comes out bad you're gonna have the understanding of like oh this is where i went wrong because cooking even though it seems like a creative process and it is what's great about cooking is it's very formulaic and the outcome is very simple and that's one of the things i really love about my job is the honesty of it right i can sit there and bore you about all the different components all technical details that went into a dish but if you put it in your mouth and it sucks it sucks you know i mean there's no way around that and that comes from technical error execution error flavor error okay so i'm going to write this formula on the board so our formula that's just going to be drilled into you time and time again this week is flavor plus technique in parentheses times execution equals equals something okay now this is important because so you have your flavor which we're going to talk today all about flavor today's our flavor lecture just so your flavor can be thought of as what you're gonna cook you gotta decide okay i'm gonna i'm gonna make a beef dish okay so that's your flavor and you have complimentary flavors that go along with that okay then you're gonna apply technique cooking technique to that beef you apply it okay cool but you can have the best technique in the world you can go and buy the most expensive steak in the world but if you can't execute it but it doesn't matter so this could be a 10 this could be a 10. if this is a 1 if your execution suffers then it's a nothing and that's one of the things that cookbooks in general do not teach you they don't teach you how to handle the stress of cooking for eight people they don't teach you how to make decisions on the fly how to use that intuition be like you know what it's winter it's cold my plates are freezing they need to go in the oven you know i need to make sure i bring my sauce back to a boil all these different things so we're going to focus a lot on execution this week you're going to you know obviously be executing in the kitchen all week but what's more important is on your final day you're going to take your execution and your understanding of flavor structure and you're going to create your own dish and execute and we're going to go through all that stuff with you so let's start with flavor because flavor is really the most important thing that's that's the first question that you're going to ask yourself when you're walking down the road of creating a new dish what will i be cooking and it sounds very simplistic when it should be the entire formula is about simplifying your approach to food with this knowledge and the skill to execute so you say yourself well i'm going to cook i'm going to cook chicken right well automatically you're eliminating certain ingredients you're eliminating certain techniques right so you're making this conscious decision you have this thought process in your head of okay well if i'm going to be cooking chicken well what part of the chicken i'm going to be cooking chicken breast am i going to be cooking chicken legs because the techniques that are applicable to the breast aren't the same techniques that are applicable to leg and thigh and we'll talk a lot about that on our technique day but first you have to construct flavors which we very creatively call flavor structure so this is where i start when i'm going to create a new dish i start with flavor structure say you know i ask myself well what's my new dish going to be okay i'm going to do a short rib dish okay so that's my starting point but there's not this mind-boggling creativity that goes into creating a complex flavor structure what goes into creating a good solid complex flavor structure really isn't that complex is the understanding of the five basic flavors the five basic tastes and i'm sure you guys have seen these before you've heard about them right salty sour sweet bitter and umami and these are the five major flavors that actually register on our tongue on our taste buds and a lot of the complexity of our flavor comes from aroma about 70 to almost upwards of 85 of our perception of complex flavors comes from aroma the olfactory system but these these flavors need to be in harmony they need to balance one another when you're constructing dishes and they contrast mute and balance each each other so salty and sour very complementary right margarita lime salt it's delicious okay bitter you have something that's bitter like a bitter green sweet balances salty and sweet will balance one another sweet obviously balances sour so if you have a dish that's sweet but it's maybe a little closing and it's one dimension there's one dimensional add a little bit of vinegar okay a little bit of a lemon juice add some sour and you have umami which is savory that's your savory meaty mushroomy roasted flavors okay all right so that's it for flavor let's go to the kitchen and cook just kidding all right so that's that's the overview now let's get into this okay let's start with salt salt super important obviously without a well-seasoned dish without salt in your food it's just never going to taste right it's going to taste bland pure and simple the number one mistake that i see with amateur cooks who are new to cooking is they under season their food now this doesn't mean you should be making a salt bomb okay your the seasoning in your food the salt in your food shouldn't be perceptible unless you're doing something where you actually want it to be like crazy like you know like salt and pepper chicken wings but for the most part salt is there to enhance flavors now how does salt enhance flavors well we have salt on our palate on our saliva naturally we have salt we need salt to function right it's how it's how our our body it's it's a natural mineral element that if we're deprived of we're going to die so our saliva contains about 0.4 percent salt in the saliva by weight so anything below that threshold is going to taste off it's going to taste under-seasoned right if you've ever baked a loaf of bread and forgot to leave the salt or you forgot to put the salt in i have it's horrible right it tastes like cardboard comes out of the oven fresh and hot it looks great smells great it looks like bread now but when you bite into a baguette you don't say hey this bag gets salty you say hey this tastes like a baguette this is great freshly baked but it will literally taste stale like cardboard so what that means is you have a seasoning threshold of a bare minimum of half a percent by weight to one percent by weight so you could literally take a whole batch of soup and go through your entire cooking process you get to the end right never adding a single amount of salt to it put the whole thing on the scale you know taking into account the weight of the pot which you can just hit the tare button and pour it in right you add point five percent to one percent salt by way boom it's seasoned you're there now you have to take into consideration obviously personal preference if you're cooking for someone who's on a low sodium diet they're going to have a much higher sensitivity to salt than someone who's just eating a normal diet who's not overly concerned about it but this will at least get you in the ballpark and because this is so important to have properly seasoned food because constructing flavors when you start adding layers of complexity such as sour and bitter and sweet you have to have your seasoning right so this takes the guesswork out so if you're if you're like i'm unsure i don't know and we're gonna be tasting a lot of food together this week side by side okay but if you say yourself i'm not really sure how much salt to add this will get you in the ballpark and you do this for a little while you do this with some dishes and you taste it and you get a sense of seasoning and then if it still seems bland that's when you move into your other flavors and you start building contrasting flavors on top layer after layer after layer okay now all salt is salt in the sense of sodium chloride okay this is our seasoning salt any any chemist in the crowd no you are you a chemist okay good so i can tell you lies and you won't even know so the word salt in a scientific term is a very very broad category right but sodium chloride is what we call salt in our common vernacular of hay past the salt okay and you see all different kinds of forms of salt uh existing in the world some will cost you upwards of thirty dollars a pound like well why is that right because it all is just sodium chloride that's it it's sodium chloride so what makes salt special isn't its chemical makeup it's the shape and shape is very important okay so let's go through the various salts that you're going to come across and make the decision of whether or not you'll be purchasing them okay so the first one is table salt also known as iodized salt this is because a very small amount in the tune of about 0.8 percent of iodide is added to table salt to prevent against goiter which is still a major issue in third world countries but being spoiled first world people we get plenty of iodine in our diet from other substances so we don't really need anymore it's kind of like a relic of the past what people see you know iodide salt it's a blanket it's comforting it's what mom uses right so iodized salt is the stuff that you find in the salt shakers on your table right and on under a microscope it looks like that you see that neat trick could have gone to art school um it's a dense crystal it's a dense compact square crystal no jagged edges it doesn't dissolve that quickly and it bounces around right so when you shake it onto something a lot of times it's bouncing off your food unless it's unless it's really moist like you got like a big bowl of spaghetti and you shake it on top okay but it has no texture it's very very small so it's just there to add salt or seasoning but also so iodide iodide itself is somewhat volatile and it will actually it oxidizes rather easily so they have various different forms of antioxidants that they put in with iodine very very small amounts uh one is the sodium ferrocyanide uh that just helps to kind of keep it from deteriorating and oxidizing but also even though they put a stabilizer in iodized salt is volatile at high temperatures about 350 plus it will oxidize at high temperatures and it'll break down become accurate so if you've ever eaten something like say like a seared steak or something that was put on a hot grill that was seasoned with iodide salt beforehand and you get that little metallic tinge in the back of your throat the kind of accurate tinge like ah what's that that's kind of weird that's the broken down iodine so because of that so that's so let's think about this for a second searing a steak above 350 yes grilling yes baking bread yes my oven's at about 5 25 when i bake my baguettes so iodide salt is out for anything uh that requires me to use high heat so that leaves me for cold heat applications what we call a finishing salt but because of its compact dense crystal because it's small it's not a very good finishing salt doesn't really adhere to anything right so for me iodized salt literally has no place in my kitchen it's not good for cooking it's not good for finishing those are my two options now you have a jar of iodine salt at home and you're making a soup and you you know you can use it for that if you're boiling pasta you can use it for that you know salt your pasta water but outside of that iodized salt to me really doesn't have much replace my kitchen so my go-to cooking salt is kosher and this would be more accurately described as kosher ring salt because technically all salt is kosher in the sense that that you're that you can eat it within the jewish religion you know so it's not it's not the fact that they actually coat like make the salt kosher it's the fact that the salt is used in the koshering process which is to purify meats by drawing out the blood and so you have kosher salt has large crystals and this is a very very detailed drawing i've worked on forever um but they're jagged right and the these jagged crystals are meant specifically to adhere to meat right so you can salt it and it'll adhere and it'll dry out the blood and you rinse it and that's part of the koshering process so this makes it great for seasoning meat before i cook it because it's literally manufactured to stick to meat it also you can find forms of kosher salt with iodine added which they basically do it again mainly to transition people from table salt to kosher salt because people still think that they need iodine in their salt but most of the major brands that you find at the supermarket don't contain iodine it's just straight-up kosher salt right so you can season the steak with it it's going to stick to your steak and you can sear it really hard on both sides and you don't have to worry about the iodine breaking down and giving you an accurate flavor so what's nice about kosher salt too is it's inexpensive and it's also large so you can see how much you're putting on a product whereas if you're sitting there with a salt shake of iodized salt you can sprinkle it all day long and it's going to take a lot of salt to actually be able to visually see it but also too you'll get used to the feel in your hand right so for me i use diamond crystal kosher salt not because it's the best kosher salt out there but it's because i've always used and when you pick up salt between your fingers all day long every day for a decade when someone switches out on you you have a nervous breakdown ah what what's that but also too i've gone to the point where i've measured what a pinch is did someone ask me before jacob what do you mean by a pinch of salt well damn that's kind of a good question so for me personally and i have sausage fingers so your mileage may vary is one finger per gram two finger pinch two grams of salt three finger pinch three grams of salt so and it's accurate as hell just pick it up and boom you're there so you so you realize that there's a this intuitive sense to seasoning that forms and that's also why i don't switch out my coastal salt because when i'm creating a new dish that i'm working on in the kitchen i'll season it season right taste it okay cool now about 20 times of doing that that repetition then you don't even think about it you're like boom boom boom boom boom i know that's the exact amount of salt that that food in that pan needs to be seasoned to how i like it right so coast salt is a great all-purpose cooking salt then you have your fancy finishing salts such as the sea salts or the french salt fleur-de-celle and fleur-de-cella is kind of like the king of all finishing sauces or salts it literally means flour of salt and with florida cell you have this delicate pyramid structure in these little circles represent gaps so it's not solid so it's very very fragile so when you bite into it you get this subtle crunch and it almost makes it somewhat sweet and it has nothing to do with its chemical makeup because it's still sodium chloride it has everything to do with how it interacts with your palate so it delivers this really subtle salty crunch this is great for finishing sprinkle it on the steaks they go out as they go out right sprinkle it on salads and there's other various types of of sea salt that because of their crystal size make them good for finishing you have maldon salt which is a big thick crystal so you sprinkle that on a grilled steak and get that crunch you get some texture from it so what makes sea salt different than kosher salt technically speaking absolutely nothing especially united states because as far as the fda is concerned which is true technically speaking all salt is sea salt whether it's inland 2 000 miles because it comes from an ancient seabed that has since dried up or it's actually a salt mined on the sea all salt came from the sea so you could literally have a salt manufacturer creating kosher salt and sea salt side by side and the only difference is the labeling on the package but you get to know certain brands you just know certain sea salts that you like to use for finishing fluid cell again is a is a great go-to you'll you will find this in every single high-end fine dining kitchen if they only can have two salts those two salts will be kosher salt and flair salt and it adds a different a different taste perception you know that little finishing salt right on top really gives you a nice good uh just kind of spike of saltiness right so it's nice when you're eating through a plate of vegetables that are already seasoned well but then you get this little punch of salt here this little punch of salt there and it dissolves quickly on the tongue so it's there then it's gone okay now you also have your uh your colored salts and your flavored salts so you have the the smoked sea salt right which they actually uh they they moisten they smoke and it gives it a smoky flavor uh we we have our on our butter that you had at dinner last night so we sprinkled a little bit of smoked sea salt on our room temperature butter all right and you also have lava salts and uh like pink sand salts and they're really more there because they look cool you know i mean and there's nothing wrong with that if you wanna if you find like a like a gray salt or a black salt or a pink salt though that works well as a finishing salt because it has a good structure and a good crunch to it and it looks cool on the plate then use it you know there's nothing wrong with that and now you have also too the newest most trendiest assault is uh the himalayan the himalayan pink salt and this is been around forever but now it's trendy because the hippies got their hands on it and what makes it you have so you have iron oxide in the salt which is what makes it actually pink there's a ton of other like trace minerals and nutrients and what they'll say is like oh well i don't use kosher salt i use himalayan pink sea salt because it has 83 trace nutrients and minerals in it and it is really really good for you and that's why i look so great because of salted yoga well it's true that it has trace minerals in it but the if you look at your daily mineral count that you're supposed to be getting from it they're so minute that you literally have to eat like a thousand grams of stuff a day which would quickly kill you to get your recommended uh mineral count from it so if you have cons i mean so i have nothing against vitamins and minerals but you're probably just better off taking a multivitamin and using the salt that you like okay so that's that salt in a nutshell you're basically looking at salt for cooking and salt for finishing [Applause] now salt that's seasoning 101 that's flavor 101 without salt there is no flavor pure and simple okay seasoning 202 is sour once you understand how to season your food the way you take it to the next level is a little bit of acid whether it's vinegar virgil and virgie is uh it's basically like sour grapes or sour fruit that's pressed and highly acidic but it's never fermented so it's kind of like a vinegar but it has a different fresh quality to it and then you have your citrus oranges lemon limes grapefruit now obviously this isn't the only sour ingredients out there but these are the major especially citrus and vinegars these are the major ones that are going to get you through okay and just like salt especially with vinegars you have some that you might want to cook with they're a little less subdue and then you have some really high-end nice ones that you want to finish with or use in like a vinaigrette you want to keep raw okay so i mean so a cooking vinegar could be rice wine a generic champagne balsamic but these can also be used as finishing too alright but these are the ones that they have a pretty broad flavor unless you're using a really really high in age balsamic you can cook with it and the flavor is not going to necessarily break down all right but your finishing vinegars are going to be something along the lines of you know 20-year aged balsamic moscato vinegar age sherry all of which we we have in the kitchen to play around with and what i recommend is get yourself a little glass vial with an eye dropper and pop your favorite vinegar in there whether it's cherry moscato champagne even like rice wine vinegar is fine and everything you cook for a month just put a couple dots on it just a couple drops because like salt acid will help to enhance the flavors of food without being perceptible without being perceptibly sour okay it's very very important to actually season things properly now everything you cook isn't going to need a couple of drops of vinegar but i think it'll really open up your mind to what can be heightened by just a very small amount of acid added to a dish now what makes acid important is its complementary status with the other major flavors but what's really important is this right here fat now we're going to talk in a second more about the evolution of our understanding of like flavor perception and how we got to that point okay but fat is still debated as to whether or not you can taste fat if you actually have receptors for fat okay um i believe that we do i don't believe it's just amino acids in the fat that make it taste like fat i think we actually have receptors for it but even if we don't what we do know about fat is it's delicious right we've evolved to the point where we crave fattening foods or animal fats specifically because before we were these lazy spoiled creatures that live in houses it saved our lives it got us through winter okay but also fat even though it gives you a great mouthfeel and body it coats the palate and it coats the palette in dense flavors so you season something with salt and you add fat your flavors are now going to be a little bit off okay so you add a little bit of acid and the acid will cut through and it'll heighten your perception of that dish now acid will also balance salt and it's a big time balancer for sweet i'm a big believer in adding small amounts of citrus to sweet desserts okay because it's it's basically the seasoning of the dessert world as is salt which is very commonly overlooked people think because they're eating something sweet that they don't need salt in it but it's still food you still need to season it so you have just a small sprinkling of salt on a dessert and it's going to open up more flavors and they throw a couple drops of acid on top and it's going to open up more flavors it's going to allow your palate to recede more so even though a dessert is kind of overarchingly sweet that's where you build that complexity of flavor that's the difference between oh hey that's a good dessert and oh man that chocolate cake was amazing right you had an acidic component you had a salty component so get yourself some some vinegars definitely and you want to stock some citrus fruits that's also too like where you know you go like a chinese restaurant you have like sweet and sour sauce you know that's good it's like it's tons of vinegar balanced with sugar you know what's not to like about it it gives you a really intense sense of flavor okay can you explain the um like with the sorbet the strawberry the walnut oil yeah the fat and then the salt right can you talk about that yeah so you all had except for daniel but daniel's eating dinner here before so you've all had the the our strawberry sorbet last night and so you look at what makes a sorbet and it's basically it's a simple syrup that's sponge so there's no there's no fat in it but i love the play of having finishing oils in general so we put a walnut oil on it uh we've also done pecan oil in the past which is a lot of fun because it literally tastes like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich it really does and then you add a little bit of of the mold and sea salt which is the finishing salt so it enhances that perception of sweetness and there's also acid in the sorbet both the strawberries are acidic even though there's even though you eat a ripe strawberry like oh it's a sweet strawberry part of the complexity of that strawberry is actually contains a lot of acid and then we do put a little bit of lime juice in the sorbet as well so what you have is you have one little just punch of flavor that has a salt it has a sweet it has acid it also has the fat and that fat fat is really great at carrying flavors and most most aroma molecules that that exists right that have a complexity of flavor in them they're fat soluble but they're not water soluble and that's actually why we're able to taste those complex molecules is because what happens is you put these foods that contain aroma molecules into your mouth they hit your palate which is water and they fly off into your olfactory system and that's how you you sense them you send them to your naval cavity so there is an argument though that if a dish contains no fat at all which sorbet by nature doesn't contain fat it's just sugar and a water-based liquid then you're going to be losing some of that complexity of flavor and also too it just trips people out that you put walnut oil in on sorbet you know what was your citrus on the bread pudding last night uh there is none yeah no i mean it's there's always it's all about personal preference and taste there's always rules that you that you adhere to and then rules that you break consciously and uh with the with the bread pudding it's just like look at let's just let's take croissants let's make a bread pudding and just douse it in caramel you know i mean like why why overthink it you know so sweet is the sugars of the world and it takes part per million wise ppm it takes the most parts per million of a sweet ingredient for to actually register on our palette than any other ingredient out there it's about a half percent by weight so a little bit more than salt okay but not much and this is because you know nature never intended us to go and you know extract salt and it's i mean excuse me to extract sugar in its purified form right this was nature's signal to us like hey this is this is good stuff you should eat it this is an apple this is an orange this is a carrot you know all of which contain a good amount of sugar and you eat it and it's nutritious for your body all right but we went and we refined sugar which gives us the ability to do lots of great desserts and lots of great things that we couldn't do without raw sugar but where sweet is very commonly overlooked is as a seasoning now again because because you can only register so because it takes about half percent of sugar for you to even think there's something sweet going on but really when you combine with all the other ingredients you're gonna need more you're gonna need you're probably about point seven five percent to one and a half percent of sugar okay because just like anything else you it's a combination of ingredients so if i took a glass of water and i dissolved .5 percent sugar into that water you might be able to be like oh there's it's kind of sweet you know just barely maybe there's some perceptible sugar there okay but in a dish it's a lot harder to pull out especially since we associate sweet with quality of ingredient think about it great carrot is sweet great tomatoes sweet a great apple is sweet okay so you add i mean very commonly like stir-fried vegetables and asian cuisine veggies sugar just a little sprinkling the french they use a tiny bit of sugar in their vegetables and they call it glassage which is basically glazing so you extract the starches from the vegetables by simmering them slowly and then you also add a spring thing of sugar and as the cooking liquid reduces it becomes this gloss that glazes the vegetables it gives you a lot of flavor

Channel: Jacob Burton

Views: 282,238

Rating: 4.9320402 out of 5

Keywords: culinary boot camp, culinary school, cooking school, flavor structure, f is for flavor, F-STEP, Curriculum, Lecture, Jacob Burton, Stella Culinary, Five Basic Tastes, Five Basic Flavors, culinary school lessons

Id: Z9L-tJxPTGY

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018