Ómós Digest #55: Don’t eliminate bitterness.
Use it to balance flavours and evolve your tastebuds.
Dear readers,
A couple of months back, I came to a rather startling realisation; that for years, I had completely overlooked an integral aspect to how we humans are designed to eat. While passing countless hours investigating how perhaps tomorrow’s plate of food ‘should look’ I somehow neglected how it should taste. And so, for today, my aim is to uncover the importance of bitterness, for the most part, a flavour lost in time.
Introducing… The Taste Game.
Growing up as a child, my father was particularly good at making up games to keep us amused, especially during the long summer holidays in Connemara. On fair days, we played ‘side to side’, a highly complex game where my siblings and I would run from one side of the garden to the next without him catching us. Another was ‘pinecone grenades’, which fell from the mammoth Douglas fir trees that led up to the house, littering the floor with ammunition to hurl at one another. That game usually ended up with a casualty or two. When it rained (which was frequent), we were restricted to the indoors and my father was forced to think innovatively. Without the distraction of a television, or the mental capacity for Irish radio, there was the birth of one game we loved above all others. Let me introduce you to the taste game.