Playing “The Taste Game” | #PodSaveChocolate Ep 135
Episode 135 of PodSaveChocolate explains how a simple exercise in the form of a card game can turbocharge your creative ideation game when it comes to developing recipes for chocolate, confections, pastry, and more.
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Episode 135 Overview
The origins of #TheTasteGame are grounded in an observation I made after attending a class given by Chef Albert Adrià (« Wikipedia; brother of Ferran Adrià, a co-founder of El Bulli) in 2004 at the Rio in Las Vegas.
In that class, Chef Adrià “broke the rules” and did not supply any recipes. He was very clear that he did not want the students to copy him, but to be inspired to explore their own paths. Listening to the students’ questions over the course of the three-hour class, I realized that while all of the students were competent (if not excellent) technicians, only a few of them had much confidence in their sense of taste.
I remarked about this obsertation to Jacques Torres, a co-founder of the Forum and one of the head judges for the National and World Pastry Team Championships, asking if I was mistaken. Jacques, who was still the Dean of Pastry Arts at the French Culinary Institute at the time, told me, “I can teach anyone technique; I can’t teach taste.”
By the time the 2005 Forum (and World Pastry Team Championships) was in the planning stages, I was working with the organizers, who were also the publishers of Chocolatier and Pastry Art & Design magazines. (I was also a contributing writer for them.) Through this relationship, I suggested I be given the opportunity to give a class on the topic of whether it was possible to teach taste.
I proposed the title Talking Taste.
I was given the go-ahead as long as I could recruit a well-known pastry chef, because at that time, I was still a relatively unknown quantity and not a personality that would draw student registration. I quickly honed in on Chef Patrick Coston, who lived and worked in NYC at the time, making collaboration easy, and whom I had met at previous Forums in events in NYC.
Our class started with a simple question for the students:
This question was followed by tasting strawberry in many forms: fresh, compound, natural flavoring, artificial flavoring, in ice cream, sorbet, etc. We then shared a confection I invented; a thin chocolate shell [Note: from Cluiszel, made with a frozen cone machine] filled with julienned strawberries that had been macerated in a cinnamon and cocoa-scented balsamic condimento and garnished with a dusting of freshly-cracked Tellicherry black pepper.
I created this confection for live pairing events as something I could assemble a la minute; one part of a larger array of “deconstructed” truffles, all assembled a la minute based on interaction with the person I was serving. This particular pairing took advantage of the fact that I already knew that strawberries and chocolate go together, strawberries and balsamic vinegar go together, and strawberries and black pepper go together. So, they should all go together. Right?
TL;DR: They do. Extremely well.
The Taste Game
The taste game was an exercise I pitched to Patrick. He liked the idea, so we worked on the elements of it together.
When the students walked into the class, there was a set of four index cards (of different colors) at every place. The cards were randomly dealt so that the set in front of each student was unique. The four sets were:
• Fruits & Vegetables
• Herbs & Spices
• Nuts, Seeds, and Dairy
• Wildcards (aka Jokers)
When we got to that point in the class, we asked each student to look at their cards and come up with a dessert that incorporated the specific ingredients in their set of cards. They could include more ingredients, and the only limits on what form the dessert could take were on the Wildcard. The only hard and fast rule is that their dessert idea MUST incorporate all four elements listed on their cards.
How? Why? Who? When?
That is what we will be discussing in this episode. In addition to revealing some of the ingredients in each category, I will also reveal some creative ways the idea can be used in social settings.
Questions?
If you have questions or want to comment, you can do so during the episode or, if you are a ChocolateLife member, you can add them in the Comments below at any time.
Episode Hashtags and Socials
#WorldPastryForum
#cocoa #cacao #cacau
#chocolate #chocolat #craftchocolate
#PodSaveChoc #PSC
#LaVidaCocoa #TheChocolateLife
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Clay Gordon
Clay Gordon
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