Vol. XI · Flavour Plate 11 of 12balance, seasoning, tasting, adjusting, 五味调和, salt, acid, sweet, bitter, umami, methodF

Balancing a Dish.

Flat? Add salt. Heavy? Add acid. Harsh? Add sweetness or fat. Thin? Add umami. One change at a time, tasting each.

Balance means that no taste dominates unpleasantly and none is missing: salt enough to lift, acid enough to brighten, sweetness enough to round, bitterness kept as an accent, umami enough to give depth, and heat and aroma in proportion. The tastes interact (XI.3–XI.6), so changing one moves the others: acid makes salt taste stronger, sugar softens acid and bitterness, salt suppresses bitterness. 五味调和 — harmony of the five flavours — has been the stated aim of Chinese cooking for over two thousand years.

The method is simple and works in every kitchen. Taste a spoonful at serving temperature. Name the problem in a word: flat, heavy, harsh, sharp, thin, bland. Make one adjustment in a small step — a pinch of salt, a few drops of vinegar, half a teaspoon of sugar, a splash of soy sauce or fish sauce — and taste again. Stop when nothing sticks out. The workshop scores a dish for balance as you adjust it.

Below: the five tastes of a dish after their interactions (flavour bench, teaching model) and a balance score that falls as the dish moves away from a well-seasoned savoury profile, for the seasoning you choose.

What you will learn
Workshop
Flavour bench, a teaching model: intensities on a log scale after the course interactions (salt and sugar suppress bitterness, sugar suppresses sourness, acid and umami lift saltiness); the balance score is 1 minus the root-mean-square distance (halved) from a target profile for a savoury dish — about 0.9 % salt with a little acid, sweetness and umami, bitterness counted only above its target. A guide to thinking, not a judgement of taste.

Name it, fix it, taste again

A stew at 0.4 % salt with barely any acid scores 0.55 for balance in this model: flat, its salt and acid too low for the rest. Bring the salt to 0.9 %, add a little acid and a touch more umami, and it scores 0.96. Each of those steps is one a cook makes by hand: a pinch of salt, a dash of vinegar, a splash of soy sauce, tasting between.

A short guide to fixes. Flat or dull: salt first, then acid. Heavy or greasy: acid, or something fresh and crisp. Too sour: sweetness or fat, or dilute. Too salty: dilute, or add acid and sweetness to distract a little — but dilution is the only true cure. Too sweet: acid, salt or a bitter note. Too bitter: salt, then sweetness or fat. Thin or hollow: umami — soy sauce, fish sauce, parmesan, a little MSG, a longer-cooked stock. Too hot: dairy, sweetness, more of the unspiced base. And the most useful habit of all: taste at every stage, not only at the end.

At the stove

Before you next serve a soup or stew, put three spoonfuls in three bowls. Add a pinch of salt to one, a drop of vinegar to another and leave the third. Taste all three and adjust the pot to the best one.

Yi Yin, the legendary cook and minister of the Shang dynasty, is credited in the Lüshi Chunqiu (third century BCE) with the first theory of 五味调和: the transformations in the pot are so subtle that words cannot fully describe them.

Terms

Balance
A state in which no taste dominates unpleasantly and none is missing.
五味调和
Harmony of the five flavours, the classical aim of Chinese cooking.
Adjusting
Changing one seasoning in a small step and tasting again.
Flat
Lacking lift; usually wants salt or acid.
Taste, name the problem, change one thing in a small step, taste again. Flat → salt or acid; heavy → acid; harsh → sweet or fat; thin → umami.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.