Resetting the Palate

I mentioned in a previous post that after months of making our own food from scratch, I taste the fakeness of some prepared foods. That is not a very specific description, and is only a part of how our taste has changed.

I had worried that making all our own food from scratch would turn us into food snobs. Food snobs are lousy guests. One of my friends used to make her own pasta, but stopped when her four-year-old started refusing to eat store-bought pasta at other people’s homes. She decided to she wanted him to be a good guest more than she wanted him to eat homemade food. A good choice, and one that I thought about when we started our experiment.

But while everything-from-scratch has made my palate more sensitive to some things, I don’t think it has made me a bad guest. Making all our own food is hard work, and when I am occasionally treated to someone else’s food, I only feel grateful.

My palate has changed and returned to something more natural, although “returned” is probably not the right word, since I have never eaten this way before.

1. I no longer need the crunch. For the first month, the foods we missed and craved most were chips and crackers. Crackers had been a staple of our life with children. I tried a few recipes for making our own, but they were varying degrees of awful. If we had bought any one of them at a store, we would would have thrown it away and vowed to never buy it again.

But somewhere in the last two months, I lost the need for the cracker. Once or twice we have made chips, but the tortilla chips and Cheez-its and Ruffles that constantly cycled through our home are gone, and I rarely miss them. I do make my own crunchy granola, which satisfies the occasional crunchy longing, but I do without the fried snacks.

(Az wants me point out that he DOES miss them.)

As for crackers: every now and then when I make pie crust, I roll out the leftover dough very thin, cut it into irregularly-sized pieces, prick holes in them, and bake them. I sprinkle on a little salt when they come out of the oven, and the kids gobble them. It would not do as a staple, but as an occasional treat for the kids, it works.

2. I want less sugar. Don’t get me wrong; we still eat A LOT of sugar. I tried to measure how long it took us to finish a 10-pound bag of sugar, but Az unknowingly refilled the sugar canister before I could mark the day. Still, I know I am eating less. There is no high-fructose corn syrup in anything I eat.

The only things I make with sugar are things that are meant to be sweet. That may sound silly, but consider the store bought items that usually contain sweeteners, but don’t in our home: peanut butter, bread, crackers, soups, marinades and sauces, canned fruits and vegetables.

Cutting out accidental sugar has decreased how much I want sugar in general.

3. I want less salt. At first, we salted things as much as usual. And cooking everything from scratch does make salt very important. A small amount of salt can be the difference between something tasting right or tasting lousy. When I made Elise’s Asian Cole Slaw, my first taste was awful. Then I realized that because I was using single-ingredient peanut butter, my slaw lacked small amounts of sugar, salt and oil that were probably in hers. I added a tiny bit of brown sugar and salt, and it tasted great.

Cooking everything from scratch has trained me in a more judicious use of salt. Potatoes need salt; bread usually needs half as much as the recipe calls for, and most foods get by with none at all.

4. I long for fresh vegetables. In late afternoon, when my taste buds start revving up for dinner, I find myself daydreaming about tomatoes or onions instead of macaroni and cheese. I WANT it, rather than just thinking I should eat it.

5. Nothing can replace soy sauce. It cannot be done. I cannot make it at home, and I cannot replace it with something else. Living without it has been a difficult adaptation. Forget the golden apples of the Hesperides; soy sauce is the real miracle food.

Soy sauce shows an area of disagreement between Az and I: he thinks that since we can’t make it at home, we should cave and buy it anyway. I am more interested in discovering how living without it will shape our palates in the future.

6. Chik-fil-a biscuits have lost their glamour. During our days of sickness, we ate a lot of fast food and take-out, when we ate at all. I used to love Chik-Fil-A chicken biscuits for breakfast. Now – meh. They’re okay.

I mourn this loss a little.

What taste do you think you couldn’t live without?

The photo above is from liberalmind1012‘s photo stream and is licensed under Flickr’s Creative Commons.

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