In the third part of this collectable cooking series, Chef Seeto explains how the five sensory receptors of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight play special roles in the kitchen. Do you use them all?
IF you thought that cooking only requires the senses of taste, sight and smell, then you’re missing two-fifths of your sensory ability to create really good food. Just as a musician listens to the notes and cues in their music to know when to sing, this harmonious relationship to their art is the same for a chef.
Listening while you’re cooking will help you monitor the recipe’s progress to prevent or correct mistakes. Many professional chefs can hear everything that is going on in their kitchen which takes concentration, patience and a lifetime of practice. From listening for the crack and pop of spices in a pan, to knowing when a pot has come to the boil, or when a steak is cooked — our ears can be trained to be an extra set of eyes.
Alas, one of the most frustrating things about working in a Fijian kitchen is that so many cooks are more likely to be daydreaming, telling stories to one another, or concentrating so hard on the cooking process that they forget to open their ears. The ability to listen to your cooking allows you to step away from the stove for those crucial few seconds to do something else, saving time and to ensure the dish turns out as expected.
So how do you train your ears to be more attentive in the kitchen? Try closing your eyes first.
Train the brain to listen
When a person is robbed of the visual world, their remaining senses become more sensitive, especially hearing. The musical talents of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, both blinded at an early age, are cited as examples of blindness conferring an advantage in other areas.
It is commonly assumed the improvement in the remaining senses is a result of learned behaviour. That is, in the absence of vision, blind people pay attention to auditory cues and learn how to use them more efficiently.
But there is mounting evidence that people missing one sense don’t just learn to use the others better, the brain adapts to the loss by giving itself a makeover. If one sense is lost, the areas of the brain normally devoted to handling that sensory information do not go unused. They get rewired and put to work processing other senses.
A 2012 study provides evidence of this rewiring in the brains of deaf people. The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, shows people who are born deaf use areas of the brain typically devoted to processing sound to instead process touch and vision.
This ability to improve, retrain and even rewire our brains to be more attuned to our environment is something experienced chefs learn over time, especially working under the extreme pressure of heat, sweat, time and perfection.
In the home kitchen you can test and improve your listening ability by simply closing your eyes when you next cook. What can you hear?
Orchestra in the kitchen
In my kitchen, it’s the gentle sizzling of onions in hot oil for a caramelising bath, how they seize up in the oil and start their long hissing song.
What can you hear?
It’s the cracking of the skin of a roasting chicken and the way a stainless steel whisk bashes against a steel bowl full of cream. It’s the sound of my Shun knife sharpening like a samurai sword, that high pitched schwing sound, and then slicing through the crunch of pineapple skin. And it’s the expired timer of an oven on the other side of the kitchen that seems no one else can hear except me.
Some cook’s ears are so sensitive they use sound to tell if a dish is done.
The famous French American celebrity chef and culinary instructor, Jacques Pépin, is said to be able to tell when a student’s piece of meat is over-cooked just by listening to it sizzle in the pan from across a kitchen.
Just as taste and smell sensations can be imprinted on your mind and later recalled, experiences of sounds in the kitchen and what they mean can also be stored in our amazing brains.
Listen to your food as you eat
Top chefs have long known food is about so much more than just the taste. It’s about the presentation, colours, textures, smell and what you hear as you bite down.
Are you paying attention to the food? The background music? The loudmouth at the table next to you?
All these components work together to determine your overall impression of the food. Scientists are now backing up what chefs have long known: sound matters. In fact, researchers have recently coined the phrase “The Crunch Effect” — the sound of chewing crunchy foods that can help you feel full more quickly. The sound helps you tune into your food, and as a result you are more mindful of the overall experience of the meal, including how much you are eating.
This mindfulness is known as food salience. The more crunching you hear as you eat your meal, the more food your mind accounts for as having eaten. Sound serves as a kind of sensory cue for when you should begin to feel full.
For this reason, many believe that eating crunchy foods can be a helpful tool for weight loss. The sound of crunching can help make you more aware of how much you’ve eaten. Instead of continuing to eat mindlessly, the sound of crunching can help you know when to stop and in theory, help prevent overeating. This concept has been demonstrated by a couple different studies. The most convincing study was conducted by the researchers at University of Colorado in conjunction with researchers at Brigham Young University in the United States.
Researchers compared two groups. One group ate pretzels while wearing headphones playing very soft, quiet music. The other group ate pretzels while listening to loud music playing in headphones. Those listening to the softer music could hear themselves chomp and chew, and they ate significantly less than those listening to the loud music. It might seem weird at first, but even becoming mildly aware of your munching can help improve your food salience.
At the table, there are a handful of acceptable sounds we might make out loud. The slurp of a soup noodles, a wine taster’s gurgle, or the crunch of eating a good biscuit.
The sounds I find exciting are the ones food makes in my own head. I create my own private food music with the hollow crunch of a crispy pineapple spine, or the dense grind of salted peanuts and grated coconut between my teeth.
The way we experience sound at every stage in between the kitchen and the table, are the sacred acts of cooking and eating that inspire story-telling between friends, family, lovers, and strangers. I want to record as many of these sounds as possible. There is a symphony in there somewhere. A vast treasure trove of food sound memories already exists in my brain, and I wonder if I could recreate them all.
NEXT WEEK: In part four of this series, we learn that our hands are just another cooking tool that gives the chef a tactile sense of touch and feel of food that will add another element to your sensory database
* The author is an award-winning celebrity chef, culinary ambassador for Fiji Airways and the “Fiji Grown” campaign, and honorary culinary adviser to the Fiji Olympics team.