The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food

As seen in Food52, Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg

Two masters of composition—a chef and a perfumer—present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious food.

Michelin two-star chef Daniel Patterson and celebrated natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients. Yet even in a world awash in cooking shows and food blogs, they noticed, home cooks get little guidance in the art of flavor. In this trailblazing guide, they share the secrets to making the most of your ingredients via an indispensable set of tools and principles:

   • The Four Rules for creating flavor
   • A Flavor Compass that points the way to transformative combinations
   • The flavor-heightening effects of cooking methods
   • “Locking,” “burying,” and other aspects of cooking alchemy
   • The Seven Dials that let you fine-tune a dish

With more than eighty recipes that demonstrate each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavor is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level to become flavor virtuosos.

Daniel Patterson founded San Francisco’s Michelin three-star Coi and several other Bay Area restaurants; most recently, he cofounded the acclaimed “revolutionary fast food” venture LocoL. His awards include Food & Wine’s Best New Chef and a James Beard Award for Best Chef in the West. Patterson is the author of two previous books, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Food & Wine, Financial Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Lucky Peach.

Mandy Aftel is an internationally known artisan perfumer and award-winning author, most recently of Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent. She has participated in many exhibitions, panels, and conferences on scent and food, and regularly collaborates with chefs and mixologists. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, O,The Oprah Magazine, and Elle, on CNN, and in countless blogs. Aftel lives in Berkeley, California.