Bradley Ogden finds that too many cooks overreach their abilities when it comes to combining ingredients. “If most cooks would just try to enhance the natural flavors that are already there, they’d be a lot better off,” he says. “Some of them don’t have the education or the palate to pull things off. Instead of keeping things simplified, they create a mishmash of flavors and tastes and textures and countries, and you don’t know what you’re eating by the time it’s all done.”
“Seasoning should not kill the taste; it should enhance the flavor of the ingredient,” says Dieter Schorner. “If you’re eating fish, it should smell and taste like the fish—not, for example, like you’re eating just saffron. I found that in some French kitchens there would be so much liqueur used in desserts that it was almost all you could taste.”
