The Art of Flavour

'Am counting down the days till your book arrives!' Nigella Lawson

Daniel Patterson, a chef, and Mandy Aftel, a perfumer, present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious, original food. Aftel and Patterson are rock stars in their respective fields: Patterson has won two Michelin stars for his San Francisco restaurant Coi and numerous James Beard and other food awards, and his new path-breaking co-venture Loco'l is attracting national interest; Aftel has been profiled in the New York Times T Magazine and other publications and is constantly featured and quoted in magazines and blogs.

In a world awash with cooking shows, food blogs and recipes, the art of flavour has been surprisingly neglected. The multibillion-dollar flavour industry practises its dark arts by manipulating synthetic ingredients, and home cooks are taught to wield the same blunt instruments: salt, acid, sugar, heat.

But foods in their natural states are infinitely more nuanced than the laboratory can replicate - and offer far greater possibilities for deliciousness. Chef Daniel Patterson and natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients, and here they teach readers how to make the most of nature's palette.

The Art of Flavour proceeds not by rote formula but via a series of mind-opening and palate-expanding tools and concepts: using a flavour 'compass' to find the way to transformative combinations of aromatic ingredients; pairing ingredients to make them 'bury' (control) one another and 'lock' (achieve an alchemy that transcends the sum of the parts); learning to deploy cooking methods for maximum effect; and the seven 'dials' that allow a cook to fine-tune a dish.

With more than sixty recipes that allow the cook to grasp each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavour is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level to become flavour virtuosos in their own right.

From The Flavour Bible on, flavour has been a particular focus of recent interest, but no one has Patterson's and Aftel's unique perspective on it, their combined expertise, or their winning blend of ideas, information, recipes and cooking and perfuming lore.

The Art of Flavour is a thinking person's cookbook that uses recipes to instil principles for creating delicious food at home, larded with fascinating information on the history and science of flavour that make it a great armchair read as well.