Flavour Pairings

On competitive cooking shows and cohesive teams.

We’re watching the latest season of our favourite TV show again, MasterChef Australia.

It’s a cooking competition, featuring mostly home cooks, four regular judges, and some celebrity guest judges.

50+ episode seasons, four new episodes per week, no drama, all food. If you love food, it’s the best.

Something I love studying each time we watch, is the way that contestants pair flavours together.

The other day a contestant was asked to hero tonka bean in their dish. Do you know what a tonka bean is? I’m guessing not. They hadn’t heard of it either. They smelled it, it smelled sweet, but then they tasted it, and it tasted bitter.

They ended up creating a tonka bean tart and pairing it with date, chocolate, caramel, and orange.

It blew the judges’ minds.

**

Flavour pairings serve as an interesting mental model to explore things beyond food.

Suppose you work on a small team, and further suppose that it’s a great team.

What happens if one team member leaves and is no longer part of the team?

Will there be a sense of loss? Surely. Can you ever replace that person exactly? Surely not.

If we adopt the mental model of food pairing here, if a single ingredient was no longer available to make a certain dish, you wouldn’t try to replace that single ingredient.

Instead you would ask, what does that ingredient represent? Sweetness? Acidity? Umami?

Once you understand this, a world of ingredients opens up.

Here’s a small mental exercise to try: Can you name what you represent to a team (or another person) that you care deeply about? If I forced you to narrow it down to just three specific sentences, could you?

I represent someone who ____________?

… is constantly learning new things and thinking of practical ways to apply them.

… makes the complicated feel simple.

… cares a ton about the quality of what we do.

To pair something well, we must first understand what it represents.

That goes for food, and people.