Building flavors

A culinary contest displays a topic including the expression "building flavours".

What is it all about ?

I invite you to see in my book "Cooking, a quintessential art" (California University Press) that a possibility of interpretation lies in considering that flavour is a sensation with time course evolution, just as language. Taking words to linguistic, one should say that there are paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects. In other words, flavour should be built for any time, and at various successive times.

At any time first: one could start from simple facts, such as sweetness increase and bitterness decrease by salt, or the fact that ordinary strawberry and orange flower water make wild strawberries. When mixing ingredients, one has to understand which supports which, how flavours are organised, and how they influence one another.

Then, with time: depending on the particular material building of food, on the presence of fat, on the colloidal structure (foam, emulsion, gel, suspension...) the various flavours appear and disappear at various times of eating.
For example, an emulsion which energetically mixed has more odor, and a "raw emulsion" has more taste. For example, the presence of fat is increasing the duration of odor. For example, various molecular associations can help to control better appearances and disappearances of flavours, as it is well explained in the book (in French only) "Traité élémentaire de cuisine" (Belin).


All this is "culinary constructivism" !