It’s always a good idea to jot down ingredients that interest you as you walk through the market, scan restaurant menus, or just catalog food cravings during your morning commute. Developing a dish can take a lot of trials, so it’s important that you’re working with flavors that really interest you and can keep you focused for the long haul. Chefs tend to use what’s around them—the produce that’s in season, the piece of meat that looks freshest at the butcher shop. Items that are abundant and in season are often also the least expensive, so you can buy enough to use during trials and service without breaking the bank.
We begin by limiting ourselves to two or three flavor profiles. You can add supporting components—for better flavor and texture—as needed, but simplicity is key because too many components will leave you with a muddled dish. You may end up changing one of your main ingredients, as we did in the case study dish, so think of them as a starting point and stay open to other ideas.
Don’t be afraid to consider out-there flavor combinations and ingredients. An easy trick, when working with three components, is to pair a classic combination with a novel flavor. Think about how chefs love mixing peanut butter and jelly (a classic food coupling) with foie gras—the rich, unctuous foie is novel and lush, while the PB&J has been pleasing our palates since we were toddlers. It all adds up to a taste experience that’s at once exciting and comfortable—and that’s the sweet spot to creating a successful original dish.
Some of our own favorite creations, like the Root Beer Float Crysosicle, for instance, or our Reuben-sandwich-invoking Pastrami Bites, began with taking common dishes and putting our own spin on them. You can flip the script on a flavor profile—make minestrone sweet, say, or do a savory take on ice cream. Still, need inspiration? Begin with a common ingredient and play with its texture. Make a dry powder out of creamy peanut butter for a dessert, or capture the bright quality of orange juice in a fluid gel.
Visualize plate design
It’s important to start thinking early on in the process about how your dish will look. Consider how your guests will eat it—which components should go on the spoon or fork at the same time, which components should be eaten first in order to capture them at the proper temperature, and so on.
This is where a good library of photo-driven cookbooks comes in handy. Use that—along with online sources—to study how the best culinary artists combine elements on the plate. Sometimes, in fact, it’s a chef’s particular plating style that inspires our dishes. Starting with a plating style and working backward to develop the components of the dish is also an excellent exercise for honing your skills.
Prep for a tasting
When you’re testing out a dish, mise en place works a little differently than it does for service. Typically, you want to use the most abundant and least desirable parts of an ingredient to test flavor, texture, and plating combinations, saving the best cuts and pieces for when you present the dish for real. Giving each ingredient a few different treatments will also allow you to work quickly through several combinations and decide what you like best.
Blog's TIP: If you can enlist a fellow cooking enthusiast to develop his own dish based on your components of choice, do it. This is something the development chefs in the ChefSteps kitchen ask each other to do all the time, because everyone will come at the task differently, and you’ll often discover approaches you never would have thought of—but that you can steal to improve your plate.
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