How do you rehydrate powdered water?

  Yesterday's use of fat might have been a useful revelation in the flavour department and as you found out, it can add unctuousness which while not a taste, is a texture. Texture or mouth feel are so closely intwined with taste they need to be considered together. But there'll be more of that later. For now it's another feature of fat that is of interest.

  The other aspect of adding fat is that it dulls flavour. This can work either as a positive or negative depending on the dish. Consider ice cream which has interesting challenges. It has a high fat content and is so cold it anaesthetises the tongue making it very hard too taste, especially after a few big mouthfuls. As a result when you're making the ice cream mix, while not frozen it has to be a full on flavour explosion. Taste some ice cream at room temperature to get an idea of what I'm on about.

Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean.

  Which brings up the topic of water. As you've probably heard, there's a lot of it about, especially in vegetables. Imagine something as simple as a cup of coffee. As an espresso it's very strong but as you add water and it becomes diluted, the flavour becomes less intense. This is obviously true for any sauce, soup or stew so I'll not be telling you anything new if I said that, like fat, water kills flavour.

  However, if you remove water you get the opposite effect, and often just doing that can really intensify flavour. Think of it as un-diluting your food. Using the fancy restaurant from yesterday's example, they will serve up jus, which is a fancy name for gravy and won't have come from a cube or granules. This is produced after an enormous of water has been removed in a process called reduction.

  First a stock is made and then reduced (boiled or simmered). While it's reducing, wine is boiled with all sorts of ingredients to add flavour, (mushrooms, shallots, herbs etc.) and then reduced. Finally the reduced stock is added to the wine reduction and it's all reduced again to really concentrate the flavour. What you end up with is... Well, if you've not tried a proper jus it's hard to describe in a way that does it justice, but the point is that just letting something simmer away for a while can work wonders.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com