The Art of Flavour: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food

Two masters of composition - a chef and a perfumer - present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious, original food. Michelin two-star chef Daniel Patterson and celebrated natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients. Despite a world awash with cooking shows and food blogs, they noticed that home cooks get very little guidance in the art of flavour. In this trailblazing book, they share the secrets to creating delcious food through the use of a truly revolutionary set of principles and tools:The four rules for creating flavourA flavour compass that points the way to transformative combinations'Locking', 'burying' and other aspects of cooking alchemyThe flavour-heightening effects of cooking methodsThe seven dials that let you fine-tune a dishWith more than seventy-five recipes to demonstrate each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavour is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level become flavour virtuosos. Praise for Coi: Stories and Recipes by Daniel Patterson:'Patterson has written a new kind of cookbook . . . The writing, like his food, is precise, beautiful, and a bit meditative.' New YorkerPraise for Fragrant by Mandy Aftel: 'Aftel could be considered the scent world's Alice Waters.'New York Times 'Mandy Aftel's latest work with Daniel Patterson is a masterpiece on the science of cooking from an olfactory and culinary perspective through the same lens. This book is a must for any chef or cook looking to find new inspirations and a deeper understanding of the way flavours work together.' Pratap Chahal (@thathungrychef), Flavour Bastard, Soho, London'Am counting down the days till your book arrives!' Nigella LawsonDaniel Patterson, a chef, and Mandy Aftel, a perfumer, present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious, original food. Aftel and Patterson are rock stars in their respective fields: Patterson has won two Michelin stars for his San Francisco restaurant Coi and numerous James Beard and other food awards, and his new path-breaking co-venture Loco'l is attracting national interest; Aftel has been profiled in the New York Times T Magazine and other publications and is constantly featured and quoted in magazines and blogs. In a world awash with cooking shows, food blogs and recipes, the art of flavour has been surprisingly neglected. The multibillion-dollar flavour industry practises its dark arts by manipulating synthetic ingredients, and home cooks are taught to wield the same blunt instruments: salt, acid, sugar, heat.But foods in their natural states are infinitely more nuanced than the laboratory can replicate - and offer far greater possibilities for deliciousness. Chef Daniel Patterson and natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients, and here they teach readers how to make the most of nature's palette. The Art of Flavour proceeds not by rote formula but via a series of mind-opening and palate-expanding tools and concepts: using a flavour 'compass' to find the way to transformative combinations of aromatic ingredients; pairing ingredients to make them 'bury' (control) one another and 'lock' (achieve an alchemy that transcends the sum of the parts); learning to deploy cooking methods for maximum effect; and the seven 'dials' that allow a cook to fine-tune a dish. With more than sixty recipes that allow the cook to grasp each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavour is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level to become flavour virtuosos in their own right.From The Flavour Bible on, flavour has been a particular focus of recent interest, but no one has Patterson's and Aftel's unique perspective on it, their combined expertise, or their winning blend of ideas, information, recipes and cooking and perfuming lore. The Art of Flavour is a thinking person's cookbook that uses recipes to instil principles for creating delicious food at home, larded with fascinating information on the history and science of flavour that make it a great armchair read as well.