Blog 17: Third Answer

1. Essential Question: What is the most effective way for culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish?

2. Answer 3:The most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish is to use salt along with proper seasoning while cooking.

3.  Support:

• Salt is a flavor enhancer; it brings out the tastes and makes them more obvious in other foods. This is one of the reasons why many fine quality meats are seasoned with little more than salt.
• Chemically speaking, salt can alter the way your taste buds perceive certain flavors when the salt is broken down by your saliva. For example, when you add salt and sugar to grapefruit, an extraordinarily bitter fruit, the sodium in the salt blocks the taste receptors for bitterness, effectively tricking the tongue into only tasting the sugar and other flavors in the grapefruit.
• Salt is an integral part of not just food, but also the human body. Incorporating it tastefully makes it easier to consume. For example, salt is an electrolyte; when you sweat, your body loses electrolytes, but something like a Salty-Nutty-Crunch bar helps replenish the lost electrolytes.

4. Sources:

• Dornenburg, Andrew, Karen Page. The Flavor Bible. New York. Little Brown and Company: 2008. Print.
• Ramsay, Gordon. Gordon Ramsay's Home Cooking: Everything You Need to Know to Make Fabulous Food.New York. Grand Central Life & Style: 2012. Print.
• My third interview with Chris Baker

5. The world would be a very boring place without salt.