Re:Side projects
by joshdotsmith on Thursday February 26, 2015 @03:38PM
(#9115309)
This right here is exactly right. If the reasoning is mentioned at all, it's usually incidental and not intentional. When we talk about salt in the seasoning step of our pan-sautéed chicken lesson, we wrote: "Salt "brings out the flavor" in chicken by reducing our perception of bitterness in foods. This, in turn, leads to an increased perception of sweet, sour, and umami (savory) flavors."
This is obviously a rather trivial example, but hopefully you see how generalizing this (and similar nuggets of information) can help.
I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).
One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.