Fermented, Dried And Aged: The Depth Shortcut Shelf

A handful of pantry ingredients do in moments what browning takes ages to build.

Some ingredients arrive already deep. Dried mushrooms, soaked and their soaking liquid kept, bring a woody savoury weight to anything they touch. Seaweed simmered gently in water and lifted out before it boils hard gives a clean, marine backbone that makes broths taste finished rather than watery. Fermented soy pastes and sauces, aged and salty, deliver savour and seasoning together. So do preserved and salted vegetables, aged hard cheeses where you eat them, and yeast extracts used with a very light hand. None of these need cooking skill. They only need to be remembered.

The technique lies in restraint and in layering. One deep ingredient reads as itself, and a dish that tastes loudly of fermented paste is not a deep dish, it is a paste dish. Two or three used lightly read as depth, because no single one announces itself. Combine a little mushroom liquid with a spoon of fermented paste and a spoonful of the caramelised bits from the base of the pan and you have three different kinds of savour stacked on each other, which the palate reads as complexity rather than as any one flavour.

Remember also that most of these ingredients are salty, sometimes very. Add them early and taste before you reach for the salt tin, or you will season twice and only notice at the table. If you are reducing a liquid that contains any of them, hold off on final seasoning until the reduction has finished, because concentration will do part of the salting for you. As a habit: add the deep ingredients before the salt, then adjust. It saves more dishes than any other rule in this issue.