You don’t miss your water

I am greedy: like most foodies, I cook because I like to eat well. And as I’ve eaten (and cooked) my way through my childhood, teens and twenties, I have asked myself plenty of questions about food along the way. What really makes something taste out-of-this-world good? Why am I enjoying this meal so much? Why is everyone obsessed with banana bread? How come this recipe is classed as perfect, or ‘genius’? Why do some ingredients seem to have been made for each other (looking at you Pret mango and lime pot)? What is the magic formula for fantastic food?

As with most things in life, there is not one ultimate equation (as neat as that would be). Still, what most delicious food has in common is dimension. And by that, I mean something that lifts it or gives it complexity. This can be the balance of flavours (salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami), it can be texture, it can be context, it can be emotion — it can be all of these things in concert. It explains why few things boost our enjoyment of food quite like memories do.

I didn’t realise that I relied on this food ‘philosophy’ until I found myself making use of different dimension-giving elements on MasterChef. The thing about taking part in a cooking competition — and on national TV, no less — is that a number of the tools that are typically available to you when you cook are suddenly taken away. Sure, they provide you with top quality ingredients and give you access to every single piece of kitchen equipment your heart could desire, but what they don’t give you? Time. And on most occasions you don’t know who you’re cooking for, either.

I have always thought that time is a key ingredient in cooking — think of all the flavour that develops when you cook a hunk of meat low’n’slow in the oven, or you allow something to ferment (think: sourdough, miso paste, yoghurt), or you dry something out (think: sundried tomatoes, parmesan, dried porcini mushrooms). But in a round of MasterChef you typically have around an hour to produce a dish (when a contestant chooses to cook something like pork belly it almost always spells disaster). Suddenly, all of those flavour-enhancing tricks are stripped away from you.

I don’t know about you but I also cook according to who I’m feeding — I know the likes and dislikes of my friends and family, I understand how their palates skew. I cook with love, knowing all of these things about them. Needless to say, when I took part in MasterChef I didn’t personally know John and Gregg, or Jay Rayner, or Grace Dent, or Jimi Famurewa. So what did I have left in the toolkit? I quickly surmised that (a) I ought to use the element of surprise and (b) I simply had to knock them over the head with flavour. Which is why I ended up using a lot of strong, bold and bitter flavours during my time on the show: it was simply the easiest way to add dimension to food under the bright lights of the studio and tight time constraints. Realising this was a bit of an ‘aha’ moment, one that compelled me to dig deeper into bitterness as a flavour profile and, ultimately, led me to write my first book.