There are only a few things I’ve voluntarily waited in line to experience. To see the David, at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Italy. To tour the Frida Kahlo home in Mexico City. To receive a Covid test a few times; at least twice for a vaccine.
Averse to hype and wed to some vague notion of “self-respect,” I have never waited in line for a Cronut, cupcake or TikTok-famous slice of pizza.
And so I had initially decided to close my heart to the latest trendy bakery, which regularly sells out of pastries like a matcha-mango morning bun, shakshuka focaccia slice and French onion soup croissant well before its official closing time.
Yet I could not deny my appetites. I love matcha, so I yearned for that bun. I was curious, too, about how the bakery seemed to fold so many flavors of the zeitgeist between layers of laminated dough.
That’s how I found myself shivering on a sidewalk in Brooklyn on a recent April morning, questioning the nature of not just my own desires but also those of the three dozen or so people in line in with me. How had our tastes become so discerning? When did, say, a blueberry muffin start to seem a bit meager, less sophisticated, as compared with the multihyphenate baked goods that we all appeared to be craving?
Somewhere along the way, I had unwittingly spoiled my taste buds. I was not a foodie, no. That identity category barely exists anymore. These days it is a norm, at least among those with disposable income, to have an ultrarefined palate and to embark on new culinary experiences whenever possible. It was not a hobby or notable personality trait; it was almost like breathing.
I just happened to be another person alive in our overdetermined era of hyperflavor, in which many of us seek out increasingly elaborate combinations of ingredients and spices to satisfy — what exactly? A drive toward indulgence? An anxious need to project a certain worldliness to our peers? Maybe, like a hojicha maple miso cookie, it’s many things at once.
We might worry it was a sign of an empire in decline if we were not so busy savoring all of this complexity.
Nick Pineau, a lawyer in Brooklyn, is mostly savoring. He is pretty sure his boyfriend, Michael, is, too — at least when it comes to the end product.
“I think he’s generally happy with the final result of what I’ve cooked,” said Mr. Pineau, 29. He likes to try recipes like a kale-pistachio-pesto pasta with lemon he made on a Saturday evening this month.
When they went on a short trip with another couple a few weekends ago, Mr. Pineau recalled, Michael “was like, ‘You guys need to stop talking about ingredients. You’re such dumb P.M.C. foodies.’” (P.M.C. meaning the professional-managerial class, a group of well-educated people who may be called “bougie” but do not belong to the bourgeoisie.)
“And he’s right,” Mr. Pineau admitted. “But it’s so fun to talk about.”
Exploding Taste Buds
It was 2020, and I was on my phone — more than usual. I was watching recipe videos on YouTube and admiring loaves of sourdough bread on my friends’ Instagram pages.
Like any coastal millennial worth her salt, I was also growing scallions in glasses of water on my windowsill and making Alison Roman’s caramelized shallot pasta. My roommate, who had temporarily lost his job in fine dining, taught me how to fold a dumpling and make a Last Word cocktail. Confined to our apartment, we were in pursuit of novelty and feeling.
The coronavirus pandemic is a big reason for the way we eat now, said Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter for Eater who started her popular Instagram account, @crispyegg420, during the early lockdowns. Her first post featured a piece of buttery sourdough toast, wilted kale and a sunny-side-up egg with dollops of chile crisp, a condiment that quickly became a staple of quarantine cooking and started appearing on big-box grocery store shelves.
It was just the latest addition to an arsenal of pantry items that the home cook had been slowly accumulating over years as hit cookbooks like Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Jerusalem” and Samin Nosrat’s “Salt Fat Acid Heat” introduced many people to new ingredients and ways of building flavor. At the same time, food publications like Bon Appétit and New York Times Cooking had begun to establish a larger presence online, shaping the tastes of young people who spent their time there.
Once the pandemic hit, novices like me became unwitting food content creators, sharing their culinary experiments on TikTok — then still a somewhat nascent platform — influencing one another and iterating on cooking trends as they spread across the internet. In this increasingly flavor-curious environment, cooks from Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas found a wider and more receptive audience for ingredients that had long been staples in their kitchens.
“Adding an ingredient that’s perhaps, air quote, unfamiliar to some people is an easy way to to riff on a viral recipe,” Ms. Makalintal said. “If tiramisu is having a moment on TikTok, then you might see someone doing matcha tiramisu or ube tiramisu.” (Then people may riff on those riffs, leading to something like “lemony garlic miso gochujang brown butter pasta,” as a recent meme joked.)
That’s a tried-and-true formula for creating dishes that feel au courant, according to Nick Palank, the marketing manager at Beck Flavors, which develops flavor profiles for clients in the food and beverage industry.
Based on its trend research and flavor development, Beck Flavors, a family-run company in Missouri that has been around since 1904, declared miso caramel one of its flavors of the year.
“We’re a meat-and-potatoes country here,” Mr. Palank said. But even in the middle of the United States, consumers are looking for more adventurous flavors: “More cultural, ethnic and specifically Asian flavors are doing really well. People want to experience the world without leaving home, basically.”
Those flavors tend to resonate especially strongly if they pair a nostalgic ingredient (caramel) with one that may be more novel, at least to a white consumer (miso). That’s how you get turmeric chai coconut, churros s’mores and berry hibiscus, some of the other trending flavors Beck has identified and may introduce in products like ground coffee, alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages and sauces and syrups.
“We’re getting away from the boring flavors, for lack of a better word,” Mr. Palank said. “Hazelnut, French vanilla, coffee.”
Status Anxiety
I grew up eating chicken cutlets; spaghetti and meatballs; macaroni salad; mashed potatoes; cottage cheese; fruit, sometimes from a can; and steamed vegetables, often from a bag. My mom got her recipes from her mom, or from women’s magazines. On the few occasions that my dad, who is from Ecuador, cooked, it was chicken legs and thighs braised in a quick tomato stew, served with rice and plantains.
Generally, things were soft, beige and on the blander side. Having internalized the notion that salt is bad for you, my mother rarely used it.
It was the 1990s, diet culture prevailed and microwave dinners still felt like a revelation for many home cooks. Magazines like Food & Wine and Martha Stewart Living sought to elevate the average person’s taste, but my parents were not subscribers. Even if they had been, ingredients like saffron and cardamom — which scented one of the “uncommon” ice creams featured in an issue of Gourmet from August 1993, the month I was born — were not staples in my white, suburban household and were not easy to find at the local Grand Union.
Sure, the average person’s taste had been elevated (as one food magazine publisher put it in 1990: “People are much more sophisticated about food than they were 10 years ago”), but it was still relatively provincial. This was the era of sun-dried tomatoes, molten lava cakes and goat cheese salads. Without the accelerant of social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, food trends shifted like tectonic plates.
Proto-foodies were often seen as belonging to an obscure niche and talked to one another in the margins of the early internet.
“It was like Dungeons & Dragons,” said Adam Roberts, who started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004. The online forums where he and his fellow enthusiasts hung out were for “misfits and weirdos.”
In the 2000s, Mr. Roberts said, new innovations in cuisine were often focused on preparation. Roasted broccoli — as opposed to steamed, as I consumed it — was a major home cooking trend at the time, he remembered.
It was not terribly cool to care about what you ate, anyway. Telling someone about a meal you’d had could be like recounting a dream.
Over the last couple decades, though, there has been a “shift toward consuming more intangible things,” said Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor at Columbia Business School. “A lot of consumers are bragging about their knowledge, their experiences. The special croissant that you had in an unknown bakery in Brooklyn signals as much as telling you ‘I’ve been to a Michelin-star restaurant.’”
With more people priced out of traditional luxury goods, like designer handbags, an $8 pastry may be the closest many of us can get to opulence. At times when so much else in life seems beyond our control, it becomes easier to justify these little treats.
Flavor Fatigue
Once I began to pay closer attention, baroque flavor seemed to be everywhere. At Starbucks, I noticed an iced lavender cream oat milk matcha had returned to the menu for spring, along with a new iced cherry chai. For the erudite seltzer drinker, my local bodega had options like calamansi, hibiscus and rose, and Guava São Paulo, the favorite La Croix flavor in my household as of late.
Out of curiosity and probably masochism, I decided to stress-test my palate. How much had it grown accustomed to these exquisitely layered flavors? And how much could I flavormax before I maxed out?
I emailed Mr. Palank and asked if he and the flavor scientists at Beck could help design a menu that reflected the tastes of the moment. I told him my boyfriend and I were planning a small dinner party for two of our most discerning friends in all matters of taste, Kevin and Dilara. I would need concepts for a cocktail, an appetizer, a main and a dessert — though of course we would eat family style since, as is the case at many of today’s small-plate restaurants, we “do things a little differently” at my house.
A few days later, Mr. Palank sent along a four-page document with several options under each heading. Reading some of the menu ideas gave me a vertiginous feeling, and an anticipatory stomachache.
For drinks: matcha martini with a twist. Spicy kimchi Bloody Mary. Pistachio espresso martini. For apps: miso and truffle deviled eggs. Gochujang-glazed chicken wings. Tamarind and yuzu ceviche. For an entree: mala rose pasta. Chicken pasta with a pistachio cream sauce. Yuzu-and-miso-glazed salmon. And for dessert: miso-caramel brownies. Turmeric and ginger ice cream. Pistachio tiramisu.
On a video call later with Mr. Palank, an affable 41-year-old man with a mini basketball hoop hanging on the back of his office door, I asked if it was possible to overload the senses with too much flavor.
“Things can be too sweet or too hot, so with something like the hot-honey trend, or with different types of peppers being introduced, you still need to consider the palate when choosing a flavor,” he said. “You don’t want to ruin the palate to where you’re experiencing heat but everything is going to be ruined.”
He had dodged my question, but I had already privately resolved to set my palate another test and go to Radio Bakery, the home of the famous (to me) matcha-mango morning bun, the same day as the dinner party. My commitment was total.
When I arrived at the shop’s Prospect Heights location at 8:36 a.m., the line was already snaking down the block.
To pass the time, I talked to a group of friends waiting behind me. Eavesdropping, I had heard them discussing plans for the next day to go to Elbow Bread, a bakery on the Lower East Side that sells, for instance, a candied kumquat black sesame buttermilk sourdough cake doughnut. I interrupted to ask: Did a plain croissant still appeal to them?
Scott Stewart said he was looking for “the best” in pastry making, something comparable to the pastries that he and his friends, Daniel Chang, 32, and Jasmine Lee, 31, had eaten when they were in Copenhagen last summer. “Everything else is kind of like, eh,” said Mr. Stewart, a 31-year-old who works in retail. “Like, I can get that at a supermarket.”
Forty minutes later, I abandoned them and left with my box of pastries and a cup of drip coffee. First, I tried the brightly dusted bun, initially skeptical because I did not see any mango. But when I bit into the pastry, subtle fruity notes played on my tongue, complementing the grassy matcha flavor. The glossy pink rhubarb at the center of the croissant I tried next was surprisingly tart, but balanced the sweetness of the custard beneath.
Between bites I sipped the coffee, which was delightfully mediocre.
I skipped lunch in anticipation of my elaborate meal, which I had shopped for the night before after solidifying my scientifically designed, flavormaxxed menu: a “sweet heat” beet salad, a favorite of Mr. Palank’s; salmon glazed with miso and gochujang, instead of yuzu (which I could not find at the nearest Whole Foods); and brownies with a miso-caramel drizzle.
At home in my kitchen, I whirled around feeling slightly manic. I took some creative liberties: I plated my beets with a swirl of labne, instead of goat cheese, adding sumac and lemon in addition to the requisite drizzle of hot honey. To my miso-gochujang marinade, I added a dash of sesame oil. I asked my boyfriend, David, to mix a classic Paloma but to add coconut water, a New York Times recipe we had discussed making before. I was going off script by discarding the drink suggestions of the Beck flavor scientists — but in a sense, I was merely embodying the principle of “rule rebellion,” which Beck Flavors had said was a top food and beverage trend this year.
I added, too, jasmine rice with scallions and butter, and roasted broccoli finished with a tahini-lemon-garlic sauce.
I placed everything on the table at the same time, swooshing sauces and scattering herbs for effect. I poured glasses of the wine my friends brought, a Lambrusco a brilliant shade of ruby. The meal was vibrant, and, I noticed as I took an overhead shot of the tableau, it photographed well.
As I ate, I realized that I had expected to be overwhelmed, but everything on my plate just tasted like good food. The salmon had a deep umami flavor with just a little heat; the tanginess of the labne, boosted by the lemon and sumac, was the perfect accompaniment to the beets, a vegetable I had once avoided for its earthy taste.
Still, by the time I was adding a sprinkling of flaky Maldon salt onto my miso-caramel brownies, I had begun to feel a wave of fatigue, not just with flavor but with life. Even though Mr. Palank had promised me I would seem elegant and cultured to my friends, I had the hazy shame of trying too hard.
My guests appeared to be enjoying themselves, though. And Kevin made a remark that I tried to take as a compliment — or at least receive neutrally.
Cleaning his plate, he told me I had made the “perfect millennial meal.”
The post My Matcha-Dusted, Lemon-Scented, Tahini-Drizzled Adventures in Flavormaxxing appeared first on New York Times.
