This is by far my favorite class. Taste & flavor class teaches you the different interactions of tastes in a dish. The class also pairs a certain dish with wine or another beverage to see how the tastes interact. Each day we’d have a specific theme, such as a spicy day, a comfort food day, and
a non-alcoholic beverage day.
On the spicy day, we made Buffalo wings with an extract of ghost pepper (one of the spiciest pepper known to man), spicy shrimp dish, chicken and more. When paired with a highly tannic wine, our mouths became even spicier. We also drank milk, water, and juice to notice the interactions. Water did nothing. Milk slightly dulled the spiciness, and juice actually did the best.
On comfort food day we made 2 different styles of comfort food dishes, one light, and one rich. The lesson dealt with the different ways you can change the texture of a dish. One example was that a group made 2 different Macaroni and Cheese dishes. One was made with a traditional béchamel sauce. The other was a sort of soufflé. The point of the lesson was to pair a certain bodied wine with the dish. We noticed that heavy wines overpowered light foods.
On each of these days, we’d dress up the table, eat food and sip wine. We’d discuss what we tasted with each dish, sip the wine and talk about how that dish interacted with the wine. We would always be full afterwards, because we ended up eating 5 dishes.
Chef Sarah also had a sauce day where she made a bunch of different delicious sauces. I helped her make a honey mustard sauce. She also made an amazing bleu cheese & red wine demi sauce that was out of this world.
We also had a mock-tail day where we all made different mixtures of drink and paired them with a little appetizer to spark a reaction.
Concurrent to this class, we had a Taste & Flavors: Wine class. In this class, our instructor, David, would teach us the methods for producing wines. We also did a lot of tasting. We’d have a journal where we would write down the aromas we’d smell, the color, the tastes and more. We got to try a lot of great wines and champagnes, and some of them were not cheap wines. We tried a $130 bottle of Champagne and compared it to a $30 bottle. Although the expensive champagne was good, it wasn’t $100 better than the $30 by any means.
For our final project, we had to create a dish and pair it with a wine. Our objectives were to make something happen to the wine. I made ravioli with ground pork & brown spices in a marinara sauce. I paired it with Chianti. You can check out my write up here.
This was by far my favorite class at NECI.
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