How to Cook With Your Senses

It's true that you should taste your food often when cooking, but your other senses are also assets in the kitchen.

By Camille Berry | Experience LifeMay 25, 2021

Food is a delight to the senses — all the senses. They pick up flavor, of course, but they also notice enticing aromas, textures on your tongue, the hiss of ingredients hitting hot oil, the beautiful color of perfectly cooked vegetables.

Although eating is always a sensory experience, it’s easy to forget that engaging our senses while we’re cooking unlocks a wealth of information — much more so than simply following a recipe and hoping for the best.

A sensory approach can transform your abilities as a home chef, whether you’re an occasional cook or you break out the pots and pans every night. It can open the door to creating delicious dishes tailored to your own palate and give you the confidence to experiment more freely. Here are some easy ways to engage your senses in creating more memorable meals.

Sight

If you’re just beginning to learn to cook by sense, recognizing visual cues is a brilliant place to start.

A glance at a pan can tell you if you need more or less oil, butter, or ghee. “Let your eyes, ears, and taste buds guide you in how much fat to use,” writes chef Samin Nosrat in her book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. “Say a recipe asks you to cook two diced onions in 2 tablespoons of olive oil. In a small pan, that might be enough to coat the bottom, but in a larger pan with greater surface area, it probably isn’t. Instead of just following a recipe, use your common sense, too.”
When sautéing onions, watch them turn from opaque to translucent as they sizzle. It’s a far more reliable method than the “five to seven minutes” instruction you often encounter in recipes. (Learn the best way to chop and cook onions for maximum flavor here.)
Our eyes are excellent tools for determining how large or small to chop ingredients, which in turn informs how long they’ll need to cook.
Watch the color of ingredients change while they’re cooking. Look for rich golden browns, whether you’re making zucchini fritters or roasting a chicken. This can tell you when food is done or when things have progressed enough for you to move on to the next step in your recipe.

Taste

There is nothing more important in cooking than honing your taste buds, says chef Christine Ha, the first blind contestant to win MasterChef. “Food is most enjoyable when everything is balanced and harmonious.”

And the only way to know for sure is by tasting your food as you cook.

Dip a spoon into a pot of soup or stew as it simmers. Do you need to add salt? Is there enough spice? Your efforts should yield a meal in which the elements enhance each other to deliver gorgeous texture and balanced flavor.
A little contrast can go a long way. Add plenty of crunchy vegetables to a noodle stir-fry or a splash of vinegar to a honey glaze. Juxtaposition may be the missing note that turns your dish into a symphony. (Try these “Tips and Techniques for Creating Delicious Stir-Fries” from celebrity chef, Andrew Zimmer.)
Tasting also lets you test for doneness. Nibble the end of a spaghetti strand to know when it’s perfectly al dente, or sample a soup to determine whether it’s adequately reduced.

Smell

The aromas of cooking can stimulate the appetite and make our mouths water. They also offer essential clues during the cooking process: You’ll smell rather than see when nuts are perfectly toasted.

Many ingredients — garlic, ginger, and fresh turmeric, for instance — become more aromatic as they cook, and when you smell them, it’s usually time to move on to the next step. The heady fragrance rising from the skillet when you’re dry-roasting whole spices tells you they’ve released their aromatic compounds and are ready to be ground. Butter takes on a rich nutty aroma when it’s browned. When cooking with wine, you’ll know the alcohol has sufficiently burned off when you don’t smell it anymore.
When whisking together a seasoned coating for fried chicken or fish, you should be able to smell the ingredients mixed in with the flour. If you don’t, add more. This also works when you’re seasoning meatballs or making falafel — check for the scent of fresh herbs and fragrant spices.
Barring obvious signs like mold, our olfactory sense is the first line of defense in detecting whether ingredients are off. If a quick whiff says something doesn’t smell right, compost it. On the flip side, smelling fresh fruit is one of the best ways to gauge ripeness.

Sound

Listen to the pan sizzling. A dry sound means you need to add another splash of oil; too much noise may mean you need to lower the heat. Sound also lets you know whether your pot is about to boil over or when all the liquid has cooked off.

You can hear when the moisture has cooked off your tofu or meat, which is a sign that it’s become crisp. When it’s ready to flip, the sound shifts from a wet bubbling to a dry hissing.
The crunch of lettuce or sharpness of celery or apples indicates they’re fresh.
Tapping the bottom of a freshly baked loaf of bread and listening for a hollow sound lets you know when it’s cooked through. Cutting into the loaf before it sounds hollow will leave you with gummy, dense bread.

Touch

Touch is a reliable way to figure out the doneness of meat or the freshness of produce. Get your hands dirty and feel what your food has to say.

Pick up a tomato, bell pepper, or plum: These fruits should be firm but not hard to the touch.
You won’t want to stick a finger into a simmering pot, but stirring and sensing the thickness of a sauce via the resistance against a spoon can indicate whether it has sufficiently reduced.
Hover your hand over a wok to determine when the pan is hot enough to start frying.
You can also use the touch test to check whether meat is cooked through. First, relax your hand and press the fleshy area of your palm below your thumb. This is how raw meat feels. Next, touch your thumb and pinky finger together — the same part of your palm below your thumb will have the firmness of well-done meat. Thumb to ring finger and thumb to middle finger are medium and medium rare, respectively.

Intuition

Once you’ve learned to rely on your five senses in the kitchen, you open the door to a sixth sense: intuition. This sense gives you the confidence to deviate from recipes and make your own mouthwatering creations. Think of it like an improv comedy show rather than a scripted sitcom.

By using your five senses, you’ll develop a knack for knowing which ingredients play well together. Conjure up flavors in your mind to make creative pairings, such as a sprinkle of smoked salt over fresh tropical fruit.
Listen to your gut when shopping for ingredients. Maybe a recipe calls for lettuce and the options at the market look wilted. Rely on your intuition to decide what to use as a substitute. That red cabbage could be a beautiful swap.
Delve into your imagination to concoct fabulous recipes with nothing more than what you have on hand.

“Food is a multisensory experience,” Ha says, “so utilizing all your senses to assess your food will help make a better dish.” Immerse yourself in the cooking process, and with a little trial and error, you can create meals that shine.

This article originally appeared as “Cook With Your Senses” in the June 2021 issue of Experience Life.