Just as in fashion there are some combinations that are a little extravagant, in the world of cooking you can find different combinations that produce surprising flavours. To give but one example, have you heard of Manchego cheese chocolates?
Are you one of those people who make a fuss when it comes to combining flavours?
As good creatures of habit, we usually eat sweet things with sweet things and savoury things with savoury things. Yet you may well have tried combining these flavours more than once, sometimes with an excellent result and other times ending up with a complete disaster.
Combining these flavours is a really old and oriental custom. In fact it was already present in both Arabic and Roman cuisine.
A simple and very popular option is to mix cheese with jam, honey or quince jelly. One of the tastiest combinations is goat cheese and strawberry jam.
If you’re daring and innovative, try white chocolate with olives. How about combining olives with oranges? The sweet citrus flavour of the orange combines perfectly with olives to make a sauce that accompanies meat.
And what do you think about mussel pie with chorizo? The result is incredible.
At a time when gastronomy and catering are booming, combining flavours is a very popular trend. Go on, we dare you to try mixing very different flavours!
Among the combinations of sweet and savoury, the most popular and oldest in our culinary culture is melon and ham, a classic Spanish dish in the summer months.
If you’re one of those who like to try new things, you’re sure at some point to have tried adding strawberries to your salad. Well, if you combine them on a skewer with tomatoes, they’re delicious as an appetizer.
Does any kind of sweet and savoury combination work?
Thanks to the mixing we see in gastronomy nowadays, the possibilities for combining any type of food are endless. This allows us to create incredible recipes on certain occasions, and incredibly bad ones on others.
When you’re afraid of the result, it’s better to play safe with your cooking, so here are a series of recipes to help you succeed.
As an interesting point of fact, in order to provide a spectacular counterpoint in the dishes you cook, you should know that it’s better to combine products from the land where you are, so that the diner can have a more enjoyable experience. What does this mean? Well, for example, don’t combine squid from the Bay of Biscay with a sweet and sour mango sauce, even if it is an accepted concept dish, since it doesn’t respect the environment where it’s cooked.
What is food pairing?
Food pairing is a tool that consists of analyzing combinations of foods based on their molecular level, i.e. two related molecules harmonise a dish.
This technique provides extraordinary results and is used to design recipes based on the intrinsic properties of any product. This gives us combinations like baked bananas, bacon or cauliflower with ketchup, chocolates filled with smoked salmon or white chocolate and caviar.
Ideas for combining flavours perfectly
Below you’ll find some very simple recipes for preparing:
Fish
- This combination is not usually very common unless it is a grilled preparation garnished with some kind of sauce that incorporates citric or sweet elements. For example, warm vinaigrettes with lime and peach or apple and lemon work very well.
- Desalted cod blanched at 90º for 1 minute and seasoned with olive oil flavoured with chili pepper and garlic and a few pieces of orange is a spectacular recipe.
Foie
- Cooked on a griddle with red fruit.
- Cream of foie with compote. A cream is prepared as if it were curds. The cream is mixed in equal parts with the foie and brought to the boil while stirring with a blender, with salt added as required, and left to cool. A spoonful of reinette apple compote is then added.
Meats
It’s common to combine sweet elements such as Port or Pedro Ximénez sauce. To do so, the juices from the roast are reduced with a sweet wine and a selection of candied vegetables are added.
Birds
- Duck magret or confit have a very marked flavour, so they combine perfectly with red fruit sauces or those made with sweet wines.
- Turkey or chicken go well with plum or blueberry sauces or compotes.
Desserts
- Yogurt with honey and cottage cheese.
- Cheese with dates.
- Cottage cheese with preserves.
In a game stew you can make the taste milder with fruit compotes like plums, chestnuts or apples. When preparing Biscay sauce, chocolate was traditionally added.
Choose a good salad tomato that is very ripe, add a splash of olive oil and a pinch of salt, and add raisins. Delicious.
What do you think of these amazing combinations of flavours? Go on, we dare you to try them!