It's a matter of taste

I received a call from a friend a few weeks back. She was trying out a new recipe for potato salad that she found in a magazine. The dressing consisted of sour cream, red wine vinegar and mustard. After following the directions, she found the dressing a bit too sour for her preference and was calling for advise. "Add 1 tbsp of sugar or honey, whichever you prefer" was my response. I also told her if that didn't sweeten things up enough, continue adding a little more sweetener at a time until it tasted right to her. A few days later she reported back that the honey had done it's magic and the potato salad was really good!

When you cook a lot, you learn to take advantage of the individual strengths of basic ingredients to achieve balance in your dishes. It comes in handy when you are dealing with guests with specific alergies to ingredients. Like adding honey to a sour potato salad dressing, thinking of the strength of an ingredient and how it may bring balance to the dish is a skill all cooks have the ability to develop just by tasting the ingredients and becoming familiar with them.

As another example, during the recent 4th of July BBQ, one of my guests was allergic to black pepper. To prevent him from having a serious allergic reaction, pepper was banned from all dishes. In most cases, that didn't cause any serious problems, but there was one specific dish that cried out for seasoning. I was making a traditional grilled middle eastern meatball called "koftah". It's traditionally prepared by pulverizing onions in a food processor to the liquid state, and adding the onion, salt, pepper, cumin and coriander to the meat mixture. The flavor without the pepper would be terribly bland, but making a certain percentage of the mixture without pepper while the remainder had it would have not been practical---after all, pepper from the seasoned meatballs could be transferred easily to the unseasoned during the grilling process....and what if they got mixed up on the grill? The solution then was to find something with a peppery taste to add to the mixture.

And I found it....radishes! I added radishes to the onions and pulverized both together before adding to the ground beef and remaining spices. Allowing the mixture to sit an marry for 24 hours before grilling also intensified the flavors. And, I'm pleased to report, neither my friend nor the remainder of the guests knew of the swap until I told them what I had done--all they knew was that the koftah had tremendous flavor and was well seasoned.

Be adventurous in the kitchen! Experiment with the flavors of the ingredients you use! Enjoy the journey! It's a matter of taste!