To become a better cook, sharpen your senses
Learn to listen to your food as it cooks and to rely on your senses of touch and smell
Kate McDermott describes it as “the sizzle-whump”. It’s the sound a pie makes when it’s perfectly baked, said McDermott, the author of Art Of The Pie. The “sizzle” is the sound of hot butter cooking the flour in the crust, melding it into a crisp, golden lid. The “whump” is the sound of the thickened filling bumping against the top crust as it bubbles at a steady pace.
“I call it the heartbeat of the pie,” she said. McDermott, 63, who lives in Port Angeles, Washington, leads intensive baking seminars across the country. But before she became a pie coach, she was a professional musician. “I experience the world primarily through sound,” she said. “I’ve been listening to pies since I started baking them.”
Any experienced cook knows that there is much more to cooking than just taste. There is touch (tapping the top of a pie to make sure it is completely firm), smell (inhaling the changing scents of the crust as it bakes), sound (listening to its heartbeat) and sight (watching for the juices to turn thick).
Learn to use all five senses in the kitchen and you’ll become a better cook — especially if you sharpen the ones that are less associated with cooking: hearing, touch and smell.
Cooks with visual impairments, who cannot see the golden brown of a pie crust or the shine of perfectly scrambled eggs, know this better than anyone. The cook and writer Christine Ha, 37, said that touch has become her primary guide in the kitchen since she began losing her sight soon after starting college.
“It’s like my fingertips have become my eyes,” she said. “I can learn so much more by touch than I would have thought.”
Ha, who lives in Houston, learned to cook only after she could no longer see. Like about 90%of visually impaired people, she is not completely blind: She can see some light and colour, and describes her view of the world as “like looking into a steamy mirror”. All the more impressive, then, that in 2012 she won the third season of the frenetic television cooking competition MasterChef.
She started cooking with her late mother’s deep-fried spring rolls, reverse-engineering them through touch and hearing, as well as taste and smell. Her fingers test the pliability of the wrappers; she listens for the sound the bubbling oil makes when she throws in a bit of filling to test its heat; she taps the frying rolls with tongs to test whether the shells are crisp and blistered.
David Linden, a neurobiologist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the book Touch, confirmed that the fingertips become more sensitive in people who are blind from birth and in those who learn to read Braille. “Hearing and touch become more acute in the absence of sight,” he said. The part of the brain dedicated to gathering information from the eyes actually shrinks in size, while the parts that receive signals from the ears and touch-sensitive nerve endings grow larger.
Linden said, however, there is no comparable adaptation for people who lose their ability to taste and smell, a condition called anosmia. “People who become anosmic are much more likely to stop cooking and eating than people who become deaf or blind,” he said; anosmics are also at much greater risk for depression and suicide. “The shared experience of food seems to be one of the things that makes us human.”
Many of the important cues in any kitchen have nothing to do with sight or taste: distinguishing the sound of a boil versus a simmer; knowing the feel of a rare steak versus a medium-well one; biting into pasta as it cooks to catch the brief, perfect moment between chewy and soft.
For most of human history, children learned those cues simply by being near the stove. But today, unless they spend a lot of time in a kitchen, their sensory cooking skills may be limited to listening for the moment when the microwave popcorn stops popping. Those children grow up to
be cooks who focus on reading and rereading recipes, often at the expense of paying attention to the stove.
But recipes are inherently limited when it comes to sensory information. An instruction like “simmer over low heat for 30 minutes, until thickened” can produce endlessly different results. The recipe doesn’t know what your stove considers “low” heat. It doesn’t know what your pan is made of. It doesn’t know what “thickened” looks like to you.
That’s why the best cooks learn to work not just with their minds and their taste buds, but also with all their senses.
The cooking teacher James Peterson uses a chicken breast to teach students how to feel for doneness, because it has thick and thin areas. “As it cooks in the skillet, keep your fingers moving from the thin part to the thick,” he said. “You’ll be able to feel how the heat gradually moves through the meat.”
Edna Lewis, the doyenne of American southern cooking, taught that listening to a cake is the best way to know when it’s done. A cake that is still baking makes little bubbling and ticking sounds, but a finished cake goes quiet.
The chef Justin Smillie of Upland in Manhattan, New York, built the short rib dish that made him famous by seeking not a certain flavour, but a certain mouthfeel. “I knew how to get the flavour where I wanted it,” he said. “But the texture was the challenge.”
“Sensory cooking is the opposite of technique,” Smillie said. “The formulas you learn in culinary school won’t make you a chef, but cooking with all your senses will.”
A multisensory approach to food is not only practical, but also all the rage. Ever since the chef Heston Blumenthal put headphones on his guests so they could listen to his dish Sound of the Sea while they ate it, and Grant Achatz served a deep breath of lavender-scented air at Alinea (it arrived at the table trapped in a pillow), chefs have been trying to create dishes that challenge our assumptions about how we experience food.
The most recent multisensory development is the connection between food and autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. A newly defined sensory state, ASMR is a kind of pleasurable shivering or tingling that spreads along the scalp, upper back and shoulders in response to soothing repetitive sounds. Originally, these included soft whispering, pages turning or having one’s hair brushed.
Now, ASMR devotees have discovered food. Video series like Silently Cooking and Peaceful Cuisine have no talking, no music, nothing to distract from the sounds of cooking: the rasp of a knife shaving chocolate, the rhythmic scrape of a whisk whipping egg whites, the glug-glug of olive oil pouring into a pan. Even eating sounds have ASMR devotees, especially if it involves chewing candy and whispering at the same time.
ASMR may provide a pleasurable new way for McDermott to experience pie. She learned that she had coeliac disease in 2006 and can no longer eat most of the pies she teaches others to make (though she has devised a gluten-free crust recipe). When a particularly beautiful specimen comes out of the oven, she said she appreciated it nonetheless.
“It doesn’t matter if I can’t eat this pie,” she said. “I can see it, I can smell it, I can touch it. The only sense I can’t have for it is taste.”
The shared experience of food seems to be one of the things that makes us human