Speciality seed and nut oils with vibrant flavours can be used as seasonings. Fry leftover rice in toasted sesame oil with an egg and kimchee for a Korean-inspired snack. A little toasted hazelnut oil in a vinaigrette will amplify a simple rocket and hazelnut salad with an echo of nuttiness. Garnish pumpkin soup with a Herb Salsa pumped up with toasted pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil to incorporate multiple dimensions of a single ingredient.
Animal Fats
All meat-eating cultures make use of animal fats, which can be incorporated into food as a main ingredient, cooking medium, or seasoning depending on its form. Most aromatic molecules are repelled by water, so in meat they’re predominantly found in an animal’s fat. As a result, any animal’s fat will taste much more distinctly of that animal than its lean meat—beef fat tastes beefier than steak, pork fat tastes porkier than pork, chicken fat tastes more chickeny than chicken, and so on.
Beef
When solid, it’s called suet. Liquid, it’s called tallow. Beef fat is a crucial component in hamburgers and hot dogs, lending beefy flavour and enhancing moistness. Without suet, or another added fat, a hamburger would be dry, crumbly, and tasteless. Tallow is often used for frying french fries and cooking Yorkshire pudding.
Pork
When solid, it’s called pork fat. Liquid, it’s called lard. Pork fat is an important addition to sausages and terrines, providing both flavour and richness. Use solid pork fat for barding and larding, two hilariously named terms for supplementing lean meats with solid fat to keep them from drying out. Barding is the term for covering lean meat with slices of pork belly— either smoked and called bacon, cured and called pancetta, or left unadulterated— to protect it from the dry heat of roasting, while larding refers to the act of threading pieces of fat through a lean piece of meat with a long, thick needle. Both processes add richness and flavour.
Since it has a high smoke point, lard is a terrific cooking medium and is commonly used in Mexico, the American South, southern Italy, and the northern Philippines. It can also be used as an ingredient in doughs, though it should be used with care, because while it makes for a perfectly flaky empanada dough, its distinctly porky taste may not always be desirable in your blueberry pie!
Chicken, Duck, and Goose
These fats are only used in their liquid forms as cooking media. Schmaltz—or rendered chicken fat—is a traditional ingredient in the Jewish kitchen. I love sizzling rice in it to lend it some chickeny flavour. Save duck or goose fat that renders when roasting a bird, strain it, and use it to fry potatoes or root vegetables. Few things are tastier than potatoes fried in duck fat.
Lamb
Also called suet, it’s generally not rendered, but it is an important ingredient in lamb sausages such as merguez in countries where pork is not consumed.
In general, fat makes meat taste good. We prize—even grade—steaks based on how marbled, or fatty, they are. There’s also the fat that we don’t love to eat—the rubbery, chewy lump at the top of a chicken breast, or the bit of brisket fat that always ends up on the edge of the plate. Why do we value some animal fats and eschew others?
When four-legged animals are fattened up with lots of calories, the cuts of meat from the centre of the animal receive the most flavour benefits. Some fat ends up layered between groups of muscles, or directly under their skin, as in the cap of fat on the outside of a pork loin or prime rib. Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat—what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within. And since fat carries flavour, many of the chemical compounds that make any one kind of meat taste like itself (beef like beef, pork like pork, chicken like chicken) are more concentrated in fat than in lean muscle. That’s why, for example, chicken thighs taste more chickeny than the leaner breast meat.
Though lumps of fat might not be so tasty on the plate, you can remove them from the meat and melt them down, then use the rendered fat as a cooking medium. The distinct flavours of animal fats lend themselves well to being used in dishes where the goal is to evoke a certain meatiness: matzoh balls fortified with schmaltz will amplify a chicken soup’s chickeniness, and hash browns cooked in bacon fat will lend breakfast a smoky, rich flavour even if no meat makes it onto the plate. A little animal fat will go a long way towards enriching and flavouring even the simplest foods.
How to use the Flavour Maps
Flip this page open. Inside you’ll find one of the three flavour maps in this book. Use it to navigate through the flavours of the world. Each level of the wheel contains a layer of information: use the two inner layers to guide you to your cuisine of choice, and then refer to the outermost layer to choose the right fat for cooking foods from that cuisine.
Fats of the World
Just as I’d discovered in Italy, cuisines are distinguished by their fats. Since fat is the foundation of so many dishes, choose culturally appropriate fats to flavour food from within. Use the wrong fat, and food will never taste right, no matter how carefully you use other seasonings.
Don’t use olive oil when cooking Vietnamese food, or smoky bacon fat when making Indian food. Instead, refer to this flavour wheel to guide your decision making as you cook foods from around the world. Sauté Garlicky Green Beans in butter to serve with a French-inspired meal, in ghee to serve alongside Indian rice and lentils, or with a splash of sesame oil to serve with Glazed Five-Spice Chicken.
HOW FAT WORKS
Which fats we use primarily affect flavour, but how we use them will determine texture, which is just as important in good cooking. Varied textures excite our palates. By transforming foods from soft and moist to crisp and crunchy, we introduce new textures and make the experience of eating more amusing, surprising, and delicious. Depending on how we use fats, we can achieve any one of five distinct textures in our food: Crisp, Creamy, Flaky, Tender, and Light.
Crisp
Humans love crisp and crunchy foods. According to chef Mario Batali, the word crispy sells more food than almost any other adjective. Crisp foods stoke our appetites by conjuring up past experiences of foods with pleasing aromas, tastes, and sounds. Just think of fried chicken, a version of which you’ll encounter in practically any country around the world. Few moments in a meal can rival that first bite of chicken, fried so expertly that the skin shatters the moment your teeth sink into it. Steam ripe with the mouthwatering aromas of that crisp batter; a loud, attention-grabbing crunch; and the comforting flavours of fried chicken all emerge simultaneously to deliver that universal experience of deliciousness.
For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate. Water evaporates as it boils, so the surface temperature of the ingredient must climb beyond the boiling point of 100°C.
To achieve this effect on the entire surface of the food, it needs to be in direct, even contact with a heat source, such as a pan at temperatures well beyond water’s boiling point. But no food is perfectly smooth, and at the microscopic level, most pans aren’t either. In order to get even contact between the food and the pan, we need a medium: fat. Cooking