Seth’s blog

There isn’t even one fermented food on a list of “the 11 best foods you aren’t eating” compiled by Tara Parker-Pope, author of the world’s most visible health blog. Nor do any of the listed foods contain animal fat. One of them (sardines) is high in omega-3, so the list gets a D instead of an F. Fermented foods and animal fat (in sufficient quantity) have easily-noticed benefits, in contrast to every food on the list. Parker-Pope and the nutritionist she consulted (Jenny Bowden) have very large gaps in their understanding of nutrition.

Of course I loved this comment on a recent post of mine about how to flavor stuff:

I made a vegetable soup today spiced by small amounts of vegetable stock, hoi sin sauce, angostura bitters, lea & perrins worcestershire sauce, kikkomann soy sauce, maggi würze, marmite, maille mustard. I can honestly say it was the best tasting soup I, or any of my guests, can remember having been served.

I routinely make soups that taste clearly better than any soup I had before I figured out the secret (thousands). There is no failure (I’ve done it 20-odd times), no worry about over- or under-cooking. Something else odd: There seems to be a ceiling effect. The texture could be better, the appearance could be much better, the creaminess could be better, sometimes the temperature could be better, the sourness could be better, but I can’t imagine it could be more delicious.
Why wasn’t this figured out earlier? I’ve looked at hundreds of cookbooks and thousands of recipes. I haven’t seen one that combines three or more sources of great complexity, as I do and the commenter did. There may be more trial and error surrounding cooking than anything else in human life. Billions of meals, day after day.

I think it goes back to my old comment (derived from Jane Jacobs) that farmers didn’t invent tractors. Some people claimed they did but I think we can all agree farmers didn’t invent the engine on which tractors are based. You can’t get to tractors from trial and error around pre-tractor farming methods. Even though farmers are expert at farming. I think that’s what happened here. I am not a food professional or even a skilled cook. My expertise is in psychology (especially psychology and food). Wondering why we like umami, sour, and complex flavors led me to a theory (the umami hypothesis) that led me to a new idea about how to cook.

And this goes back to what many people, including Atul Gawande, fail to understand about how to improve our healthcare system. The supposed experts, with their vast credentials, can’t fix it — just as farmers couldn’t invent tractors. Impossible. The experts (doctors, medical school professors, drug companies, alternative healers) have a serious case of gatekeeper syndrome. The really big improvements will come from outsiders. Outsiders who benefit from change. To fix our healthcare system, empower them.

If I need evidence that we like complex flavors, I will quote this passage from The New Yorker:

“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”

The soy sauce is fermented. As any regular reader of this blog knows, I believe we evolved to like complex flavors so that we would eat more bacteria-rich food. So we have something in our brain that measures complexity of smell/flavor and translates that into pleasure: the more complexity, the more pleasure.

My experience of cooking is that it isn’t easy to produce a lot of complexity using spices and stuff like garlic and ginger. It’s possible but not easy. Ordinary recipes, such as in Saveur, aim for a low level, with 5-8 spices. Chinese Five Spice has 5 spices; spice mixtures might have 8; curry powders might have 10. At Whole Foods, the ready-to-eat soups have twenty-odd ingredients. Apparently their soup designers don’t find it easy, either.

Then I discovered that miso by itself produced sufficient complexity. Miso soup doesn’t feel “under-complex”. Finally I understood why wine is such a powerful flavoring agent; wine, like miso, is fermented. It makes sense that foods that our complexity detector  evolved to make us eat do a better job of setting off that detector than other foods.

Now consider how that detector works. Suppose you have two sources of sodium — two different salts, for example. You get the same saltiness from 2 g of Salt A as you do from 1 g of Salt A and 1 g of Salt B. I think complexity is quite different. I suspect that 2 g of Source A (e.g., miso) will produce a lot less complexity than 1 g of Source A and 1 g of Source B (e.g., wine).

I tried adding two fermented flavoring agents (miso and tsukudani) to soup. It worked! The result tasted clearly better than miso alone. Now I do this routinely. It’s very easy. The results have a level of deliciousness I can’t remember encountering before. Everything else I can eat (such as restaurant food) now seems less delicious. I think that three sources works better than two; whether four is noticeably better than three I don’t know.

The basic idea is there are strong sources of complexity (fermented foods) and weak ones (all other flavoring agents). One strong source = 10-20 weak sources. You get the best results by using several strong sources of complexity, perhaps three or more. Once you know this you no longer: 1. Obsess over recipe details (as in the New Yorker quote) because all complexity is alike and easily produced, just as no one worries about the source of saltiness. 2. Think traditional, time-honored recipes are better than what you can make yourself (e.g., Saveur). As far as I can tell food professionals (with one big exception) don’t understand this. I really enjoyed Top Chef Masters (a competition between 12 of the best chefs in America) but there was an almost total absence of fermented foods. Perhaps one chef used soy sauce. The winner, Rick Bayless, made a mole sauce. Mole sauces, which combine 20-odd weak sources of complexity, take hours. I think they produce less complexity than three fermented sources put together, which takes about a minute.

In James Michener’s Poland (1983), a Polish peasant in a concentration camp tries to survive by thinking about food (p. 532 of the paperback):

He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony.  He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

Later he thinks about animal fat:

He imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

According to Wikipedia, Poland was based on “extensive study of Poland’s history and culture.” Thanks to Nadav Manham.

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.