Does this sound familiar to you? You’re watching a TV show or movie, and a character holds out a wooden spoon of tomato sauce and says, “Taste this.” It’s probably a man, because tomato sauce is the only thing men can cook on TV. (Excluding Food TV, obviously.)
It happened on the episode of My So-Called Life that Laurie and I watched the other night. (We got the box set for Christmas.)
Has anybody ever done this sauce-tasting thing in real life? It sounds messy. Then on last night’s episode, someone tasted a soup and said, “This needs something.” I’ve never heard that, either. These are the food equivalents of the woman sweeping the entire shelf of pregnancy tests into her cart. (We just saw _Juno,_ too.)
Any other favorite TV food cliches you want to share?
My partner and I actually do that all the time – bringing each other spoonfuls to taste and saying that the dish needs something (and then trying to figure out what).
Actually, I’ve done both. Often. I think partly because I often cook by feel/taste (Italian) and not by recipe.
I’ll admit, I’m a cliche. I haven’t done the first one but we do “this needs something” all the time.
Happy Birthday Laurie!
My mother and I taste-test each other’s cooking all the time, and it’s not limited to South Asian cooking. We do it for others, too, even tomato sauce.
Yeah, I do this if there’s someone else around when I’m cooking. It’s true that on television, it’s always with tomato sauce, though.
On tv, when people actually eat, they rarely comment on what they are eating or how it tastes.
Happy birthday, Laurie!
i know many, MANY women that have more than 10 pregnancy tests in their bathroom at any given time. i actually went on a dollar store run with an obsessed teacher friend. the incredulous teenage clerk’s eyes widened, and she said, “are they giving these away free at the highschool now?”
sauce, soup…yes. we’re both chefs and always trying to outchef each other.
I generally go by smell. The only time I taste is when I’m not sure how much salt to add.
Sarah and I also give each other tastes and provide feedback while cooking.
My favorite food related tv moment is when the bachelor checks the milk in the fridge by drinking directly from the carton and then does the spit take because the milk is bad.
A cliche that bugs my mom: Whenever people are eating Asian food on TV it’s always straight out of paper takeout containers, and with chopsticks. In tv land there are none of those round aluminum containers, and nobody is chopstick-impaired.
These are great–keep ’em coming! Misty, my favorite version of that one is when he then pours the milk into the sink and it’s all chunky.
When you taste a dish and it needs something, what does it need? I can’t think of anything beyond salt, pepper, and acid.
Is your next post going to be called “I like cold beverages”?
Thai food might need more palm sugar. (Yes, I am being intentionally difficult. :) )
It’s not exactly cooking-related but in every film involving female bonding there a scene where they are dancing around the kitchen table. Candles and wooden spoons are usually involved.
I’ve repeatedly seen the bit where someone is told there’s no food in the house but then they manage to whip up something amazing anyway. This is almost always a man impressing a woman who says she never cooks, because otherwise the scene would be sexist. Usually his masterpiece involve a big salad whose greens would, if ever actually purchased, be liquidified in a plastic baggy at the bottom of a drawer.
I tried this exact miracle over Christmas at my dad’s house this year and when the dishes were delivered to the sink most of them had little piles of my impromptu sauce on the side.
(The pregnancy test thing happens in Knocked Up too, which bugged me because I expect better of that writing team, but they actually made the scene funny in unexpected ways.)
I actually just said “taste this” last nite. In this case, it was b/c I had done good and couldn’t wait until dinner was served for the feedback. But often it is b/c I cook by taste bud braille, not recipes, and am sometimes uncertain if i have reached the summit of the expedition. Also, I like more salt than most non-sea-dwelling species, so I need to knoq when to stop.
Now, my husband has actually responded “it needs something” becuase he cannot cook, so he can only answer, yes it is lovely, or no, it needs something.
now the “smell this” cliche is another story…..
There’s the “fancy restaurant” cliches too, like the guy wandering around playing the violin (or maybe accordion, since it’s always a French restaurant and accordions are so French)
Yeah, we share tastes. Dunk ladle into the soup pot, get a tiny serving of soup, have every available cook (currently can be up to n=6) take a taste. Discuss the flavor profile. For a soup, this will happen at least 2 times as it cooks. Usually one tasting of naked stock, one after the other ingredients have been added and are about cooked through. If there are several ingredient stages, there will be flavor checks as each batch of ingredients hits cooked through.
(happens with other dishes too, but soup offers lots of points of departure, and it’s good to have all cooks agreed on which direction we’re going)
The dish can need: more of a vegetable, use different rice next time, we should have roasted the garlic, forgot the cloves, less salt, mouthfeel isn’t full enough, mouthfeel is too full, needs hot peppers, needs star anise, not enough tomato paste, not enough oregano, should have added fresh basil, the salad wants sorrel, no no take out the cucumbers and turn them into quick pickles… along with a whole lot of other mods.
(no, I’m not kidding about the cucumber. Cucumber grown in drought conditions can get very bitter, and then it’s not much use in a green salad. Makes a good quick pickle tho, and then the bitterness isn’t an automatic meal killer. Eating local is not always a great joy.)
I have also said “this needs something”, usually translating to “more wine!” but I’ve never considered a sauce a success because I could stand a fork upright in it. Remember THOSE commercials? “So thick you can stick a fork in it!” Like your tomato sauce could double as caulking in a pinch..or am I really way to old to be blogging and nobody else remembers what I’m talking about?
I remember a chili commercial like that. I think one of the actors said, “Who eats chili with a fork?”
Flavor profile? Really?
I think what people are generally looking for when they think it needs something is: freshness. It is amazing what a difference it makes, and the only way to ‘fix’ not having it is to disguise the lack with layers of ‘flavor’. Unless of course, you live in Emily’s house, where it sounds like it’s the Iron Kitchen if the Iron Kitchen was really the Brady Bunch, haha…
Maybe when a dish “needs something,” it’s MSG.
Flavor profile? Really?
Yeah. These sorts of things happen when you have a research focused food scientist in the family.
When Paul and I decide that something “needs something” the something we add is usually one of these: lemon or lime juice, wine or vermouth, sugar, cayenne, smoked paprika or ground coriander. Don’t tell anyone our tricks. :)
oh! i thought of one!
men on tv can never tie their own ties!
oh. i guess that’s not food. unless, um, the tie was made of froot-by-the-foot. which i’m pretty sure would only happen at the wedding of the kool aid guy and the sunmaid raisins girl.
nuts. i’m out.
You know, I thought I might be getting sick today, but I was feeling better until I envisioned the Sun-Maid girl getting it on with Kool-Aid Man. Thanks.
Those same men that can’t tie their ties can’t clean house. The exception is if the wife is coming home with a new baby, in which case he mops the floor wearing said tie. I guess he doesn’t want to untie it until she gets back!
Just an observation…if you wanted to get past the cliche foodie lines….this blog might not have been the best place to do it. ;-) Where else can all the cliche foodies hang out, but at a great foodie blog!
I do that! Definitely for sauces (to check for salt) and for dishes I’ve never made before.
I definitely ask my husband to taste soups or sauces while I’m cooking. He’s pretty good at determining the need for salt, acid or herbs/spices.
We share tastes all the time, Matthew, and if you hold your hand under the spoon whatever it is drips into the palm of your hand where it’s seldom hot enough to burn and you can lick it off.
At our place, what is most often needed is fresh herbs. Maybe salt, at least when someoneElse is cooking. grin
For a couple of decades, every bag of groceries has a baguette sticking out of the top.
I forgot about the baguette thing, until this morning when I was walking around with a baguette sticking out of my bag, and I noted that it was just like in the movies.
Maybe when a dish “needs something,†it’s MSG.
Actually, this is pretty spot on. I often find myself saying, “this needs more umami!”.
My partner instead tends to say that a dish lacks complexity or profundity.
This really means that we’ve watched Tampopo too many times, I think.
Oh, and often when food needs something, I find that it needs salt, pepper, fish sauce, or ground dried birdseye chiles.