Earned Complexity

Watching the dozens of Anthony Bourdain shows from No Reservations to Parts Unknown, I saw a noticeable difference between Asian cuisine and European cuisine. Actually, it’s Southeast Asian versus the Mediterranean. Then again, the main comparison in my head was Malaysian versus Italian. Yet, I could draw similar comparisons to Korean and Spanish for that matter. 

The difference formed a thought around simple cooking. The type of cooking where the ingredients do the talking. Think about a steak seasoned only with salt and pepper. It could be handmade pasta cooked with cheese or charcuterie with toasted bread. There is no fancy seasoning. The taste is all in the simple ingredients. 

This is a factor my uncle missed the most when comparing his lifestyle in Canada versus England. He reminisced about the fresh ingredients flown in every day from the Mediterranean. He said the ingredients made all the difference to his cooking. 

Think about balsamic vinegar that takes a minimum of 12 years to age or culatello that take a minimum of 2 years to age. You eat them as they are and they’ll taste amazing. No sauce is required. You could even say the nonrenewable resource of time did all the flavouring to these simple ingredients. It might also be why fine aged ingredients demand high price tags given the difficulty of replicating them quickly. 

Yet, my experience with Malaysian, Thai, Chinese or Korean cuisine isn’t like that. Now, granted, these cuisines have so many dishes and I can pick out the exceptions but the vast majority are often laden with sauce. 

The sauce heightens the taste of the overall dish. But it masks the raw taste of the ingredients. You know what I mean. The kind of sauce that is so overpowering that you wonder how the ingredients themselves taste. A comparable function would be condiments in the West. Consider mayo, ketchup, mustard, and gravy. 

I used to think they added flavour but they might’ve merely been an attempt to mask the uninspiring taste of low-quality ingredients. The kind that are mass-produced, filled with chemicals and lack all nutrition. Now, they are affordable and I’m all for that. That doesn’t take away from the fact that they taste like nothing—or worse. 

Just think about your own groceries. How orange are your egg yolks? They might be a pale yellow. Think about the beef you see. Is it bright red or the pink of corn-fed cows? Do you know if your fish or meat were dyed with colour because they were grey? 

One of the reasons I like to cook is because I like to have control. I like to pick out my own groceries. I have preferred places for vegetables, meat, and fruit. They can all be different places depending on the day. It might appear suboptimal for time but it’s optimal for cooking.

I thought about this daily act of cooking. It’s been part of my life since leaving home at 18. Yet, I realized cooking wasn’t as common as I thought. One of the top reasons from peers who avoided cooking daily was that they didn’t have the time. Come to think of it., cooking did take a decent amount of time out of my week. I never thought of it as time lost until people pointed it out.

I understand why people like to delegate grocery shopping to Instacart. I can understand why startup investors like Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant tell their entrepreneurs to stop wasting time cooking and only focus on building their company. But I also don’t understand how it makes sense to drop the ball on controlling your own health and delegating that off to other people. 

Cooking wasn’t just about health. That’s where I thought about how I cooked and how I liked to default to very simple recipes. It wasn’t a matter of controlling the flavour I wanted (i.e. freedom of sauce mixology). It was a desire to maintain the integrity of what went in my mouth. 

I don’t care about cheap eats or “tasty” dishes. I care for the integrity of whatever I’m putting in my mouth. Most restaurants have trash food and they douse it in sauce. But I expect that because eating at restaurants aren’t always about the integrity of the dish in front of me. It’s mostly about the experience 

It’s about the people I eat with, where I eat, when I eat and why we are eating together. There’s so much more associated with eating out that the food becomes a small part of the overall equation. Yet, when it comes to cooking at home, I think the food and the process is everything.

That process starts with grocery shopping. It’s a process that starts with simple cooking at its core. A simple meal with rice, meats and veggies (or carbs, protein and fats) doesn’t need fancy flavours. It needs quality ingredients and it will taste amazing. 

Like I said, it’s not a matter of flavour. I’m Korean and what Westerners call umami is akin to the simple notion of “taste” in my culture. There’s a reason why Koreans smuggle in our instant noodles, packets of kimchi and tubes of gochujang (Korean chilli sauce) whenever they travel to Europe or the Americas. It’s because to our tastebuds, these cuisines lack flavour. But no, simple cooking isn’t giving up this flavour. 

Simple cooking allows the ingredients to speak and the integrity embedded in its quality will tell you if it tastes good or not. It’s only when this simple process is understood that complexity should be introduced. 

Complexity, to me, is flavour. This is where all the sauces that make or break the various Asian cuisines I mentioned should come into play.

See, it’s not about pushing flavour away. It’s about understanding the beauty of simple cooking and the importance of making sure the process is solid. Simple cooking doesn’t allow for errors in purchasing quality ingredients. That will result in poor taste. 

In this way, complexity is earned. The default shouldn’t be ketchup drizzled everywhere to hide the poor mistake underneath called food. This is no different from every other process in life. 

Companies will hide the chinks in their armour or a crack in the foundations of the business with the space equivalent of shiny new acquisitions, new hires or fancy PR campaigns. The same could be said for all the self-promotion that happens on social media or the simple act of buying a sports car to sauce up the shitty human underneath. 

Learn to cook simply. Then add the flavour.