How to Balance Flavors in Cooking

To produce the best tasting meals, you most balance the flavors s you cook. Follow these steps to accomplish this task.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Salt
• Sugar
• Citrus juice

1. Add a salty flavor to your food by using not only salt but any of the following ingredients: salted butter, soy sauce, fish sauce, sun-dried tomatoes or bacon. Salt brings out all the other flavors to balance, especially anything sweet.

2. Use a sweet flavor to balance the salty taste in your cooking. Sugar is the first sweet flavor that comes to mind, but you can also use molasses, caramelized onion, maple syrup, rice syrup or artificial sweeteners to attain a sweet taste.

3. Balance salty and sweet flavors in cooking with a sour taste. The triangle made up of these three flavors will provide the perfect balance. For a sour taste use citrus juices, tomatoes and vinegars.

4. Add sweet if the flavor is too sour, salt if the flavor is too bland, sour if the flavor is too salty or sweet on top of sweet if the flavor is too spicy.

5. Let food cool just a bit before testing for flavor balance. If you try to taste while too hot, you will get heat and not flavor on your tongue.

Tips & Warnings

• Not every pepper produces the same level of heat and not every jar of spice has the same flavor as the next one on the shelf. Use small amounts of flavorings to balance the flavors in your food. Taste test them. You can always add more flavor, but you can't take the flavor away.

Resources

• Website will direct you to information on balancing cooking flavors

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