The Menu: 'Flavour bombs' are a home cook’s secret weapon to keep kids eating

Ivo Duarte’s new Cork-based food business Sauer opens up a whole new flavour spectrum for the home cook. Picture: Miki Barlok

A new acquaintance was berating herself for a perceived failure to keep delivering “enough flavour” to ensure her teenage brood remained well fed, despite having “all the cookbooks and being on top of all the latest food trends”. Incidentally, she presumed my profession meant my own progeny were unicorn children relishing even wildly exotic fare.

I demurred. My own kids were as idiosyncratic, random, and at times exasperating as any young human gradually coming to terms with flavours and what they liked, loved, or loathed, preferences regularly reversed in a single week.

Each night after work, my friend slogs in the kitchen spanning culinary continents as she takes on global cuisines or religiously recreating from cookbooks offering fast family favourites. Yet her wretches do as most children do: adore a dish, wolf it down, and then, a week later, receive it as if it were raw liver smoothie with a side of cat’s eyeballs.

My children taught me that a new flavour had to be surrounded by a posse of old favourites. These days they still won’t eat everything I like, but I am pleased they are unafraid to try something new.

New, though, has also become a problem. All food has to be “new” in this digital age of foreshortened attention spans as we rabidly pursue what’s trending on TikTok or Instagram, before discarding it for whatever else snags the eye for a nano-second. We no longer spend time with a foodstuff, mining its real depths and flavour potential.

We picture flavour as being entirely oral, to do with the mouth, the tongue; we praise a “fine palate”. But flavour is special because we use all our senses to recognise and appreciate its nuances. Presumably, sensory hyper-vigilance would have helped prehistoric ancestors divine the toxic in tasty.

The nose is crucial. Pinch yours closed, pop a familiar food into the gob, and observe as flavour falls away. When I got covid, I couldn’t smell — and therefore couldn’t taste, my worst professional nightmare. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste (1825), was one of the first to acknowledge the vital importance of the nose: “In fact, taste and smell might be part of the same apparatus. You can think of the mouth as the factory and the nose as the chimney but they’re all in the business of producing a certain range of experiences.”

Ivo Duarte’s in Sauer. Picture: Miki Barlok

Experimental psychologist Charles Spence and El Bulli chef Ferran Adria, demonstrated that diners found strawberries 25% less sweet when served on a black rather than a white plate.

Other studies show that eating with hands rather than utensils, heightens flavour. Even sound elevates the experience: sizzling bacon, butter scraped across toast, tea being poured; aural alarms for other senses to be on alert for incoming foods.

Professional kitchens often have high-tech gadgets and ingredients rarely, if ever, found at home, deployed in processes taking hours, days, weeks, or even months, to perhaps create a single bewitching element that defines a dish’s flavour. This is not the world of a deeply stressed parent with half an hour to feed a migraine of mewling kids.

What I really like about Ivo Duarte’s new Cork-based food business, Sauer (formerly, Terra Ignis), is how his range of products opens up a whole new flavour spectrum for the home cook. A trained chef, Duarte uses natural, often foraged, ingredients and extended processes such as fermentation and dehydration to create novel end-products of wondrous flavour, with the heavy lifting already done.

The addition of Sauer’s fermented red onion salt to a butter-fried Ballyfin egg omelette made for a gorgeous lunch recently

You can make very simple flavour bombs at home. Domestic cooks have been pickling, preserving and fermenting for millennia. A good book such as Dearbhla Reynolds’ The Cultured Club, is a boon — a single Saturday in the kitchen can yield a flavour trove to boost several months’ worth of plain dishes.

I always have flavour bombs to hand, either homemade or purchased elsewhere. Last week, a swift salsa of onion (red, white and spring) with lime, chilli, and salt supercharged sandwiches, wraps, and tacos for the next three days. My first homemade miso paste took two days for the initial process and nine months of fermenting, but last Wednesday, a spoonful became sublime miso soup made in the boiling of a kettle. Best of all, the addition of Sauer’s fermented red onion salt to a butter-fried Ballyfin egg omelette made for a gorgeous lunch, heading heavenward on an ethereal and utterly intoxicating wisp of allium flavour.

Cush Midleton

In these harrowing times for hospitality, it is a real joy to, for a change, hear a good news story, and I was especially delighted to learn that the home of the late, lamented Sage Midleton has been repurposed as the new venue for chef Dan Guerin’s Michelin Bib Gourmand Cush restaurant, in Ballycotton, where he turned out some very fine food. Expect more of the same in Cush Midleton, looking very sharp following its handsome new makeover.

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Today’s Special

While the notion of Ivo Duarte’s extensive Sauer (the ‘sour’ in ‘sauerkraut’) range of products might include a few outliers to startle more conservative eaters — including kefir vinegars, kimchi hummus, kombucha Worcestershire — divine flavours will convert all, but I recently introduced a few fainthearted souls to sauerkraut by serving a classic Alsace choucroute, sausages and meats braised with Sauer’s Purple Sauerkraut (€7.99)

After devouring the dish, which softens the initial impact of the freshly fermented sauerkraut, they were ready to then experience the delightful crunch and that wonderful lactic fermented tang, a world of flavour that many Irish diners are still coming to know.

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