Seth’s blog

Two of my students took me here, which one list said is the best fish restaurant in Beijing. (Based on our meal, that’s plausible.) Its specialty is grilled fish “Wushan style”. Wushan is a mountain, not a province (like Sichuan or Hunan), so the restaurant may have invented the term. The menu is short. There are a bunch of cold dishes and the grilled fish, which comes in seven different flavors (hot & spicy, chinese sauerkraut, etc.). Unlike any other Beijing restaurant I’ve been to, you need a reservation. (Call a week ahead.) The restaurant, which wasn’t large, was packed. The walls were covered with Post-It notes. One said: “I wish I find my dream girl and me and my friend Bob have a safe life.” Another said: “Very spicy, very tasty, makes me feel very good.” A third said: “We had to wait a long time, so we ate a lot.” I wrote one saying what one of my students suggested: “We didn’t have to wait a long time but we ate a lot anyway.”

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.

Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?

The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.

My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.

This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.

A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”

In a New Yorker podcast, Calvin Trillin says:

I live in Nova Scotia in the summer. And I hear a lot of talk about how Newfoundlanders eat mainly pork scrap.

Hey, that’s what I eat: pork scrap. (And fermented food.) Pork scrap (large pieces of pork belly, actually) is absurdly cheap: $1/pound or less.