In the final part of this cooking series, Chef Seeto explains how the five sensory receptors of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight play special roles for seasoned chefs in the kitchen.
WHETHER you’re cooking at home or professionally at work, when it comes to presentation of the food on the plate, our eyes provide the final sense of cooking.
Sight is important because you can see that you’ve overcooked your vegetables or watch how delicious that roasted chicken is because you’ve basted the crispy skin with lashings of butter. You can see the oil ripple and swirl when it hits the fry pan telling you the pan is good and hot. Sight provides the final sensory tool in how a dish looks.
They say we eat with our eyes and although taste and flavour composition is how your food will be remembered, how it looks on the plate will ultimately decide if you get that “wow” from your diners as you bring it to the table. Even the most humble of dishes like fish and chips, a curry, stir fry or the classic spaghetti Bolognese can be transformed into restaurant quality dishes if you understand the basic principles of food presentation.
Remember to BUFF
Lots of professional chefs use the B.U.F.F. system to enhance the look of food on the plate. It stands for balance, unity, focal point and flow. It’s a technique that master judges also use at competitions like Fiji’s Salon Culinaire.
Balance is the use of colour, food combinations, garnishes, shapes, textures, portion sizes, and flavours on the plate.
You don’t always have to chop curry pieces so small that you don’t even know whether it’s chicken, goat or duck. Next time try making the pieces chunkier or leave the drumsticks whole to create a different looking curry.
Shapes play a very important role on the plate but a lot of inexperienced chefs cut every ingredient the same way as if making a salsa instead of thinking whether it would be better cut long, diagonal, chunky or short.
Unity is how the components come together including contrasts, negative and positive spacing and height. Focal point is what the eye first sees and is usually the largest hero ingredient and its relationship with smaller shaped foods.
For example if the dish is a prawn salad, then the prawn should be the first component that is visible, not the salad ingredients.
Finally flow is the use of motion and design principles to enhance the visual presentation and may include knife techniques, curved items, fanned items, and layering. It could also be the way the sauce or dressing is napped on the plate to bring together the ingredients in a flowing swirl.
Using the BUFF technique helps chefs to understand that there is so much more than just dumping the ingredients on a plate of food — it is art.
Imagined sight
More important than visual sight is imagined sight. What you expect to see should also be a part of the cooking process. If you are cooking under pressure it is easy to forget where everything goes on the plate but if you already have a picture in your mind then it makes it easier to remember. Many chefs will sketch out a rough drawing to visually remind themselves.
When you are reducing a sauce, you should have in your mind the image of how thick that sauce should be when it is properly reduced. You should see it in your mind. Then as the sauce reduces and you keep looking at it while stirring, it should be continuously approaching the image in your mind.
You should imagine how brown your fried chicken will be before it reaches your ideal, or how much broth relative to garnish in a soup, or where you’re going to put the mash potato or rice on the plate before the piece of steak.
Visually conceptualising your dish throughout the cooking process also helps you to remember the steps you must follow to finish how your food looks on the plate.
Forget the basil garnish
Garnishing a dish is one of the most important final touches to any plate but make sure you use functional ingredients that add to the overall flavour, taste and look. Ever since we learned to grow local basil in our kitchen gardens, Fiji’s chefs love using the herbal flower as a garnish for just about everything.
Every year the Salon Culinaire judges see basil on just about every dish as if the chef thinks a green or purple garnish makes the dish look prettier but if the herbal garnish adds nothing to the overall flavour of the dish, it is pointless putting it on.
For many dessert chefs, it is the mint leaf. These garnishes are called non-functional as they serve no purpose or sense on the plate. Mint is a great addition to fruit salads that have an aromatic dressing, or as an addition to a South East Asian salad dish where it adds to the flavour, but if your food is bland, the use of a herb garnish just shows the cook doesn’t understand its purpose.
There have been so many times when I’m presented with a plate of tasteless food and wished the chef had of used the basil inside the dish and not on top.
On a recent visit to Joji’s noodle shop at MHCC Suva, a fellow, bemused customer watched as I added some more components to my bowl of combination soup noodles.
“I can’t believe you just made that bowl of noodles look so much more prettier” said the curious onlooker. It’s all in the simplest of functional garnishing.
Hidden sixth sense
All of these five senses — taste, touch, hearing, sight, and smell —lead to the most important sense of all, common sense.
This cannot be written into a recipe. You can’t Google the common sense of making a bolognese sauce, but it is critical in good cooking and often lacking in many kitchens.
Common sense is ultimately what all the other senses are about. It’s common sense to clean your counter before beginning to cook, common sense to add more salt or lemon juice if you taste the soup and it needs a little enhancement of flavour.
But common sense is also what we continue to develop throughout our cooking lives.
When you first cook a steak, it is not necessarily common sense to know from touch whether it is rare or medium well inside. It is common sense to pay attention to the feel and what it looks like when you cut into it, and to remember it so that it becomes common sense.
So all of our six senses ultimately combine to form perhaps our most valuable attribute — awareness. Awareness may be the most important quality of being alive, and it is very much suited to cooking. Pay attention. Enjoy your senses. Take pleasure in feeling the texture of homemade pasta; the sight of a roasted chicken; the aroma filling the kitchen; the taste of a raw tomato, salted and still warm from the sun in the garden. Or the sounds of fat crackling in a pan.
And never forget what good sense cooking makes. Our world is better when we cook for the people we love, and we make healthier food more appealing to help fight NCDs. Our bodies are healthier, our families are healthier, our communities are healthier, and our environment is healthier.
That’s the sense I love most about cooking. Its goodness.
* 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 Olympic Team.
