Category: food

Psychophysics of Flavor Complexity

Seth Roberts15 Comments

If I need evidence that we like complex flavors, I will quote this passage from The New Yorker:

“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”

The soy sauce is fermented. As any regular reader of this blog knows, I believe we evolved to like complex flavors so that we would eat more bacteria-rich food. So we have something in our brain that measures complexity of smell/flavor and translates that into pleasure: the more complexity, the more pleasure.

My experience of cooking is that it isn’t easy to produce a lot of complexity using spices and stuff like garlic and ginger. It’s possible but not easy. Ordinary recipes, such as in Saveur, aim for a low level, with 5-8 spices. Chinese Five Spice has 5 spices; spice mixtures might have 8; curry powders might have 10. At Whole Foods, the ready-to-eat soups have twenty-odd ingredients. Apparently their soup designers don’t find it easy, either.

Then I discovered that miso by itself produced sufficient complexity. Miso soup doesn’t feel “under-complex”. Finally I understood why wine is such a powerful flavoring agent; wine, like miso, is fermented. It makes sense that foods that our complexity detector evolved to make us eat do a better job of setting off that detector than other foods.

Now consider how that detector works. Suppose you have two sources of sodium — two different salts, for example. You get the same saltiness from 2 g of Salt A as you do from 1 g of Salt A and 1 g of Salt B. I think complexity is quite different. I suspect that 2 g of Source A (e.g., miso) will produce a lot less complexity than 1 g of Source A and 1 g of Source B (e.g., wine).

I tried adding two fermented flavoring agents (miso and tsukudani) to soup. It worked! The result tasted clearly better than miso alone. Now I do this routinely. It’s very easy. The results have a level of deliciousness I can’t remember encountering before. Everything else I can eat (such as restaurant food) now seems less delicious. I think that three sources works better than two; whether four is noticeably better than three I don’t know.

The basic idea is there are strong sources of complexity (fermented foods) and weak ones (all other flavoring agents). One strong source = 10-20 weak sources. You get the best results by using several strong sources of complexity, perhaps three or more. Once you know this you no longer: 1. Obsess over recipe details (as in the New Yorker quote) because all complexity is alike and easily produced, just as no one worries about the source of saltiness. 2. Think traditional, time-honored recipes are better than what you can make yourself (e.g., Saveur). As far as I can tell food professionals (with one big exception) don’t understand this. I really enjoyed Top Chef Masters (a competition between 12 of the best chefs in America) but there was an almost total absence of fermented foods. Perhaps one chef used soy sauce. The winner, Rick Bayless, made a mole sauce. Mole sauces, which combine 20-odd weak sources of complexity, take hours. I think they produce less complexity than three fermented sources put together, which takes about a minute.

My Theory of Japanese Aesthetics

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?

The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.

My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.

This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.

A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”

National Fisheries Institute: Stop Misleading Us

Seth Roberts6 Comments

After Jeremy Piven won a legal decision saying yes, he may have had mercury poisoning from sushi, the National Fisheries Institute, a seafood industry group, issued a statement. Its crux was this:

Despite the fact that the arbitrator ruled in Piven’s favor, NFI cautions reporters and editors to continue to treat Piven’s statements with skepticism. It is important to note that no peer reviewed medical journal has ever published any evidence of a case of methylmercury poisoning caused by the normal consumption of commercial seafood in the U.S.

Excuse me? Surely they know about Jane Hightower’s work. I suspect this is why they used the term medical journal. Hightower’s work on mercury poisoning was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is peer-reviewed. Hightower is a doctor. So what if EHP isn’t a medical journal? This statement, although literally true, is completely misleading. Hightower’s article is here. It supports exactly what Piven claims.

Here’s a quote from Hightower:

I think I provided a missing piece of the puzzle: That this [excessive mercury] exposure is coming from fish that we purchase at the grocery stores and restaurants. . . . Some people are eating so much of the commercial, high-mercury fish that they are over the mark for tolerable allowances set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the FDA, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the World Health Organization.

Japanese Ice Ouca versus Bi-Rite Creamery

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco has the best ice cream I’ve had. The ice cream at Japanese Ice Ouca in Tokyo is maybe 95% as good but the presentation is so much better than Bi-Rite I was stunned. The prices are about the same at the two places. At Ouca you get a choice of three flavors (versus two at Bi-Rite). The three flavors are mixed in an attractive pattern. You get a pretty round wafer to add crunch. And you get a little bit of salty chewy seaweed to eat after you’re finished. Ouca doesn’t stand out from other high-end Japanese food, which is full of these sorts of effective small touches. In Iceland I met a Japanese teacher of English who said, “I like everything about America except the food.” American food is like barbarian food — except worse.
When she was a teenager, Jane Jacobs visited a relative of hers in isolated rural Pennsylvania. Her aunt had moved there to oversee the building of a church. The inhabitants had forgotten that buildings could be made out of stone. American cooking reveals a similar vast forgetting.

Do They Eat Dogs? (Continued)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In answer to the question “Don’t they eat dogs?” a blogger living in Taiwan stated flatly: “No. They don’t eat dogs.” Now, from a Beijing University student named Xiong Lilin, here is a definitive answer about Mainland China:

Yes, we do. But not every Chinese person eats dog and never for everyday meals. In some provinces, there are restaurants that serve dog meat in the winter. A few people will have one or two meals every year during the coldest days. Eating dog meat can make people warm and prevent colds. Although these kind of restaurants exist, they are disappearing. In fact, mutton has the same function as dog meat. In my home town, Chengdu, many people eat mutton on DONGZHI, the day winter begins according to the Chinese traditional calendar.

More In this New Yorker article, published today, Michael Savage, the radio host, contemplates eating dog. Xiong Lilin later wrote: “Yesterday, my roommate asked me what kind of dog we eat. She seems to think that we eat pet dogs. In fact, we do not eat pet dogs, the dogs we eat are raised specially for eating and belong to different kinds from the pet ones.”

Tsinghua Dumplings

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has a nice post about dumplings, including this:

I once made 888 dumplings for a party, my personal record. . . . You might have crudites, warm cheese, stale hummus, left over at the end of the party. You will never have leftover dumplings — unless you burned them.

This reminds me how much I liked the dumplings a the Tsinghua student cafeterias. I think they were served at every meal but I associate them with breakfast, maybe because there was less choice at breakfast. Fresh and homemade and chewy and well-spiced and incredibly cheap (like all the cafeteria food). Maybe 6 for 25 cents. There was an optional vinegar-like sauce (speaking of fermented foods). There were two types (pork & ??) but I didn’t understand the Chinese names.

I tried to avoid them. They were too easy and familiar. But it takes a certain amount of stamina to eat strange food so if I was tired, I’d have dumplings.

Less of a Foodie

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Two weeks ago I was in New York City. I have been there many times. For the first time, I was unexcited by the prospect of eating in the city’s fascinating restaurants. I think it’s all the fermented food I eat (at least two servings per day). All of it has complex flavors; all the New York restaurant food I liked had complex flavors. I am no longer complex-flavor-deprived.