Some people are born with culinary awareness in their DNA, knowing when to add a pinch of this or a dash of that. Chefs have built careers on their ability to create exceptional flavor profiles with less than obvious ingredients. The rest of us have Niki Segnit. Her 2010 cookbook, The Flavor Thesaurus, identified 99 flavors, which she organized into nearly 5,000 pairings. That's a lot of matchmaking. Her follow-up, The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors, expands the lingua franca of food using plant-based ingredients.
Take miso. With notes of barnyard, nuts, brown butter, honey, olives, and exotic fruits such as banana, mango, and pineapple, it can be difficult for Westerners to describe. Like an aged cheese, miso's flavor profile develops as it ferments and provides many opportunities for flavor discovery.
Beyond a morning cup of coffee, Segnit offers pairings with fennel, dates, and prunes. In Greece, Turkey, and Albania, mixing fennel liqueurs with coffee to go with a custard-based dessert is a popular way to punctuate a boringly sweet dish.
Pecan has notes of butter and brown sugar and the sweetness comes through as the nuts are chewed. "It's almost as if you're creating the nut milk as you're masticating the ingredient," says Segnit. Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.
Maple Syrup & Pecan
Pecans taste like maple sugar creamed with sweet butter and eaten from a hickory wood spoon. The kinship of pecan and maple syrup goes deep: that specifically North American flavor of forests and campfires, smoke, marshmallows, firewood and coffee. Maple syrup is made by boiling down maple sap. The rule of thumb is that forty gallons of sap will yield one gallon of syrup, depending on the sap’s sugar content, which can range from 1 to 5%; 2–3% is typical. The water is cooked off until the sugar content reaches 66%. Anyone who’s watched a pan of broth reducing will understand that doing likewise with a pan of maple sap would make watching paint dry seem like a Safdie brothers movie. Keep on reducing past the 66% mark and the moisture will be driven off entirely, leaving maple sugar. It’s for this reason that maple sugar is so expensive: twenty times the price of regular brown sugar in UK supermarkets. It is, however, so delicious that you’ll have to clamp your eyeballs in place to stop them spinning in their sockets. Use it wisely, for instance in pecan sandies, a cookie that just about earns its place in the shortbread family. Ordinarily, shortbread is plain and low enough in sugar to make butter the star. Sandies are sweeter, studded with nuts and dipped in more sugar. Cream ¼ cup maple sugar and ¼ cup superfine sugar with 1 ¼ sticks unsalted butter until pale and fluffy. Mix in 1 tsp vanilla extract, then gradually stir in heaping 1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour, 1 tsp baking powder, ¾ cup pecans, chopped, and ½ tsp salt until just combined. Divide the dough into 10 balls of roughly equal size, then roll in maple sugar and space out on a lined baking sheet. Bake at 325°F for 20 minutes, or until golden at the edges, then carefully transfer the sandies to a wire rack to cool.
Loosely based on Roget's Thesaurus, Segnit organizes pairings into inspiring expressions for the palate, plotting tastes into 360-degree circles, where flavors share a commonality with their neighbor. Furthering the breakdown, Segnit developed flavor families. "All the different connections that you find can lead you to a path to find a way of liking an ingredient, of opening up your palate," she says.
In her book The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors, Niki Segnit describes the notes and tastes of plant-based ingredients, something she says is often difficult for the layperson to do. Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.