Flavor Combinations

First, before you read any of this, you ought to open a new tab in yer browser and go to the myspace page for a musical entity called Ducktails. I'm listening to it right now and it's really soothing for me and I'd like for you all to feel this way too. They (he) are relevant because they were reviewed on peefork today, so...

A few months ago I started working at a restaurant that specializes in lobster and new england seafood in general. Everyone who works there really likes food a lot and like experiments with food and ingredients and all of that. There's a guy who waits tables there with me, we'll call him "El Flaco", who seems to be in the avante-garde of the food experimentation culture at the restaurant. He knows lots about food and can discuss in depth the definition and history of the torchon as a method of preparing foie gras or why the John Dory (a fish, for you less 'cosmopolitan' readers in our flock) is called the John Dory. He's not obnoxious about it though, and he likes that song where Paul Wall says "I got tha innanet goin' nutz," so I find his culinary elitism not just palatable but informative and quite fun.

One day El Flaco came in with a special meal for us for our staff meal. It was a lobster bread pudding that he had put together for a family gathering in New Jersey the weekend before, and had set aside a batch to bring in for his friends at the lobstah bahhhh. It was very good, the bread pudding was. Savory and moist and stuff. But the part that really stuck with me was that he had made a sauce of lobster stock, vanilla bean, and tarragon to accent it. It was a sweet sauce, and a bit savory as well, and complemented the bread pudding really well. I thought this a novel meeting of culinary strangers. But, alas,I am from the midwest. And I am vulgar and low brow and not relevant, so of course I thought that. As The Skinny One pointed out to me, lobster and vanilla are a classic flavor combination. Like blueberries and mint or tomatoes and basil or chocolate and raspberries or (as pictured) watermelon and pork belly.

So I've gotten real interested in this whole idea of classic flavor combinations. I think it will allow me to take my cooking, and my general food snobbery, to a whole new level. I got this book called The Flavor Bible that is basically a huge index of most every ingredient you can think of, and for each one a comprehensive list of ingredients and flavors that it pairs well with. Pretty cool. Very exciting for someone who always messes up set recipes. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it and bringing up what I learn from it in conversations to make people think I'm cultured.

Off to eat.