My friend Nicole and the fundamentals of flavor

Wow, y'all -- sabbatical is fun! I've spent the summer doing a lot of things (obviously none of them were writing blog entries), only some of them food related. I've been hiking, kayaking, seen some plays, thought about Elizabethan protestant polemic (seriously more interesting than you would think). I went to Portland for my birthday and learned what a real food town feels like. More so than Seattle, even more so than San Francisco, Portland right now is a hot bed of chefs doing really innovative things with super fresh local ingredients. I strongly recommend Le Pigeon and Pok Pok, and you have got to try the breakfast pastrami at Kenny and Zuke's. The Saturday market there is huge and eye-popping, with literal truck loads of green beans the day we were there, and tons of people doing interesting, artisanal foods in their basements. More on that later . . . Local ingredients is the mania in Portland, but the other trend we noticed -- at Clyde Commons, Le Pigeon and a few other places -- is the communal table. There was a time in my life when this would have sent me screaming, but a wonderful thing about being older is that I care much less what other people think of me than I used to, so sitting at a communal table is actually kind of fun, and somehow seems to make the food feel more the center of attention.

However, what has finally nudged me to return to the blogosphere is a meal made by my friend Nicole during a recent trip to Glacier National Park. Glacier may be the only thing in my summer more beautiful than the bacon foie gras I had in Portland. After a 13+ mile hike up to Dawson's Pass, culminating in a jaw dropping vista of the Nyacke valley, I returned to the rental house to the equally impressive experience of a meal prepared by Nicole. Let me tell you about my friend Nicole: she is a stone cold good cook, and a master of the gourmet dinner party. She regularly makes her own stocks. She transforms rice into a symphony. I have never had anything she made that wasn't simply delicious, a feat made more amazing by the fact that she is usually cooking for between eight and thirty people. Impressive.

In Montana -- Hungry Horse, to be exact, just past the Deer Lick Saloon -- she was making a more modest meal for the five of us sharing the trip. The recipe was a classic Julia Child's, and, typical of Julia, labeled something modest like "Simple Saute of Beef and Mushrooms." And, in some ways, it was simple: beef, mushrooms, shallots, wine, potatoes, cream. The result, especially in Nicole's hands, was exquisite, and the more I have thought about that meal, the more I've realized that it illustrates a number of fundamentals of good cooking. So, since I'm not returning to the classroom any time soon (ha ha!), I thought I would do a little schooling here.

Lesson the first:

Brown means flavor. It is incorrect to say that browning caramelizes food, because caramelizing sugars is only a small part of the incredibly complicated chemical process that happens when you brown meat, technically called the Maillard reaction. Browning food, using high heat and a little oil, does tend to make things taste sweeter, but it also intensifies and complicates the flavors. If you are not using a non-stick pan (which you shouldn't be), browning also allows you to build up fond, the yummy brown bits stuck to the bottom of your pan. Fond is crucial to a good sauce. In this recipe, beef, mushrooms, and shallots are all browned successively, creating many layers of goodness. Plus, she browned a small dice of potatoes that she left out of the sauce, which added flavor but also a lovely crunch.

Lesson the second:

Good ingredients matter. Nicole sprung for filet for this meal, and I have to admit, I was skeptical. I generally think filet is expensive, doesn't have a good beefy flavor, and its vaunted tenderness often seems more mushy or even chalky to me. I was wrong -- filet was perfect for this dish. The fairly small pieces of meat (about two inches) had a lot of surface to be browned, so there was plenty of flavor developed, and the tenderness of the meat was sublime. Also, you need to respect your ingredients, which almost always means don't over cook them. Nicole's beef was sublime because it was medium rare bordering on rare. The same applies to most vegetables -- just cook them enough to take the rawness away, but leave some snap and crunch.

Lesson the third:

Classic combinations are classic for a reason. Beef, mushrooms, onions, cream. There are a million recipes featuring this combination for a reason: the flavors complement each other, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's the salad nicoise principle. There is nothing bad in a salad nicoise -- potato, green beans, tuna, olives, hard boiled eggs -- but on their own, none of these ingredients is a show stopper. But, you put them all together, and wow! So, if you start to notice the same cluster of ingredients showing up in many different types of dishes, pay attention. There's a reason.

Lesson the fourth:

Everything is better with sauce. It may not be the most sophisticated rule, but what can I say -- it's the frenchie in me. I over sauce my pasta. I put hollandaise on even the freshest of salmon. I like me a good pan sauce on almost everything. It's also just so easy to make a simple sauce: start with a pan filled with fond (see lesson the first), deglaze with some sort of acid. Nicole used red wine, but you can also use white wine, vermouth, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, etc. If you don't have a lot of fond, you can punch up the flavor by also adding some sort of stock. Let these things reduce down a lot, and then swirl in either a little butter, a lot of butter, or cream. If you add cream, let it reduce a little as well. If you go butter, then turn the heat off before you add it, and just swirl it in. The next step in fanciness is to add some new flavor component: shallots and/or garlic are almost always a good choice. You could add mustard, or capers, or sun-dried tomatoes, or mustard. You get the idea. Taste for seasoning, and pour it over the meat.

Lesson the fifth and sixth:

You need fat to carry flavor. You need salt to be able to taste the flavors that are there. Good food isn't diet food, but I think those of us who learned our nutrition in the eighties overdid our fear of fat. The truth is, fat conveys flavor, so if you don't have fat in your dish, you need to have much more intense flavors to get anywhere with it. Meat with marbling, butter, cream -- these all make the existing flavor recognizable to your tongue. I don't know the chemistry of this one; I just know it's true. Right now, there's a lot in the news about the dangers of sodium, but if you cook for yourself, I guarantee you will consume less sodium than if you buy a lot of pre-made food. You have to salt your meat before you brown it, or it will never taste good. A bland sauce probably just needs a little salt to perk it up. At some point, adding more salt will make things saltier, but the amazing thing is that, for a while, adding salt changes the flavor profile without making it seem salty. Try it -- taste something without salt, and then keep tasting it as you add salt, until you hit the point when it seems actively salty. You get a huge range of flavor doing that.