Over the years, I’ve learned to cook in the style of several of the world’s cuisines – Southwestern, Italian, Chinese, Thai, and Pacific Northwestern. My attempts at learning cuisines lead me to see that there is a clear path to becoming proficient. The key is to understand two things about the cuisine: its flavor palette and cooking techniques. (NOTE: In this blog entry, I am concentrating on cooking with a palette. We will return to cooking techniques later.) This is very much akin to how an artist produces a painting. His palette holds different colors of paint which he can use to depict a scene. His painting techniques result in different styles of paintings – everything from abstract to an almost photographic reality. Likewise, a chef creates a new dish using flavors and ingredients from a cuisine’s palette and the appropriate cooking techniques. (We are ignoring fusion cuisine for the moment.)
What exactly is a cuisine palette? It is a list of the common ingredients and flavorings found in signature dishes associated with the cuisine. Let’s ground this concept by looking at the palette for Italian food. Italian food is well known world-wide so I use it as an example because many people can relate to it.
Listed below is my cut at defining the palette for Italian food. It identifies the cuisine’s ingredients in broad strokes. It includes those flavors most commonly seen in well-known Italian dishes (e.g., lasagna, spaghetti, pizza, etc.) and is not meant to be an encyclopedic list of everything that might ever appear in any Italian dish.
| Italian Palette | |
| Ingredient Category | Ingredients |
| herb | basil, oregano, thyme, red pepper flake fennel, dill |
| spice | cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla |
| other flavorings | balsamic vinegar, red and white wine vinegar, red and white
wine, capers, pancetta, prosciutto |
| animal protein | pork, beef, lamb, poultry, lots of seafoods, eggs |
| cheeses | ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella, pecorino, feta and many more |
| other dairy | milk, cream, sour cream |
| sweets | honey, chocolate, various sugars, various liqueurs |
| fruits | lemon, lime, orange, berries, apples, pears, apricots, peaches |
| nuts | hazel nuts, walnuts, pine nuts |
| vegetables | tomato, fennel, onion, garlic, various olives, various squashes,
potato, leeks, sweet potatoes, artichoke, caper |
| beans | string beans, garbanzos, cannellini |
| breads | ciabatta, focaccia and others |
| other foods | pasta – many types |
Now that we have a palette to work with, the next step is to take it and derive a new Italian-ish dish. This will involve choosing ingredients from the palette and marrying these together with right cooking techniques to produce a new and exceptional dish. My next blog entry will be taking on this challenge. Come back and see how I do 🙂
Food Spice Life! 