Season to Taste - Reece Youhn

When I first started cooking, there were three words that would never cease to cause a kitchen crisis. They weren’t “devein the shrimp,” or “there’s a fire!” instead they were “season to taste.”

When I cook, there are three different voices guiding my process (no, they aren’t my mom, dad, and sister). Instead, I have to navigate the conflicting desires of my head, heart, and gut. Logic, emotion, and instinct often compete for influence over my taste buds. So, when I was confronted with a subjective amount of spice to add to chicken, my body launched into debate.

Just shake the pepper! my heart cried. 

But what if it’s too spicy? What if it’s not spicy enough? my mind responded.

You should fry it, my gut grumbled.

I’d conquered the coq au vin and trounced the taco, but the thought of seasoning to taste had left me frozen.

Attempting to avoid total-body shutdown, I did what anyone would do--asked the internet to solve my problem for me. After extensive research, I decided to add four gentle shakes of cayenne pepper. And although the chicken tasted great, my efforts felt inauthentic. The dish didn’t feel like me. 

It wasn’t that the food was bad, just that I hadn’t taken my preferences into account. I hadn’t made the dish my own. When I started cooking, recipes were manuals--I followed each outlined step. But I’d never thought of cooking as a form of self-expression. So, understandably, I was floored at the prospect of engineering a quantity of spice, let alone an entire recipe, myself.

The day after the infamous “chicken incident,” I found myself in the pressure cooker that is Differential Equations, analyzing what had gone wrong. My body had multiple opinions. My math brain told me that there was only one “right” answer, and I hadn’t gotten it right. Yet, my sentimental heart told me in life, there’s often more than one answer–sometimes things just don’t add up. (My gut was just ready for the lunch bell to ring).

I’ve always loved math; it’s straightforward, binary. When confronted with a gray area, in the past, I’ve tried to push it to one side or the other. In terms of my own identity, I struggled to accept that I could be someone who both believed in logic and also yearned for unbridled, individualistic creativity.

So I decided to put myself to the test by cooking whatever I desired, rather than using a book. This was seasoning to taste on a grand scale. A white wine reduction delicately spread across a roast chicken? My mind was in love. Handmade pasta? My heart agreed. Loaded nachos supreme? My glutinous gut was happy. 

By learning how to season to taste, I learned not what, but how to cook. In doing so, I learned to embrace my full self in the kitchen. Granted, my culinary escapades were riddled with mistakes, but nothing teaches humility like serving an unreasonably bad stew to your family and watching them try their best not to spit out what you have made (yes, we did eventually order pizza).

The kitchen helped me realize that not everything can be measured and summed up in a universal equation; the beauty of certain things is in their inability to be concrete. Just as a good spice blend doesn’t contain one seasoning, I’m not one type of person. I love straight edges, equations displayed in neat lines (though my handwriting would disagree with me on this), and the brain-bending effort it takes to tackle a sufficiently complex Sudoku. But I also love the ingenuity of a good pun and reject the idea of an organized room for fear of losing “flow.” I get tears in my eyes both when hearing a moving melody, and when I perfectly dice an onion. I’ve come to realize that I’m a blend of my own creation, seasoned to taste.