1,556 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

Balancing flavours

In the kitchen, we sometimes use ingredients that can be a little overwhelming in taste.

Grilled lardons, for example, are very good, they give a great taste to a lot of recipes where they are added, but you have to be objective, they're still pretty fatty!

9,200 5/5 (17 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Flavors Tastes Balance Nuance

Last modified on: November 7^th 2020

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Balancing flavours

And as a result, this fatty, suave side can sometimes be a little too much, when you add these lardons to something a little busy, tone on tone, for example a tartiflette.

tartiflette

The point here is not to try and lighten things up (after all, "fat is life"), but rather to try and accompany this flavor.
You might think that discarding the cooking fat and keeping only the "dry" lardons, and/or blanching them before cooking, would reduce the taste? Yes, a little, but not that much, in fact. They'll certainly be lower in calories, but their strong taste will still be there.

So what can you do?

I suggest giving your lardons a sort of tonic accent:

Grill them as you usually do (say, a small frying pan over high heat, with the lardons alone in it).
Once they're toasted to your liking, add 2 or 3 tablespoons of vinegar all at once. Be careful, it will boil and release very pungent fumes (start your hood first if you haven't already).
Continue cooking for about 15/20 seconds, until most of the vinegar has evaporated.
Remove from heat, and use in your recipe (allow to cool if necessary).

By proceeding in this way, you'll give the grilled lardons a hint of acidity that will balance, or counterbalance, the fatty, suave, original flavour.
This delicate nuance is the perfect accompaniment to your recipe.

So, you've seen the general rule: when there's a risk of a little too much fat, compensate with a little acidity.
Another example in the same spirit: enjoy rillettes (rather fatty) with a good glass of Bourgogne aligoté (rather acidic), each revealing the other, it's a delight...

Note that it also works the other way round, which is why creams or lemon preparations, for example, are often generously creamed or buttered to soften the acidity a little.

lemon curd

In short: with things that are quite fatty in taste, think about adding a little acidity, and in the other direction, a little cream or butter to a preparation that's too acidic.

Lasts posts

XO Cognac Explained: Meaning, Aging, and Flavor Profile

XO Cognac always goes beyond the labels on the bottle: it is often associated with tradition and quality. You get to appreciate the artistry, character and ageing process when you understand what defines this smooth Cognac. The section below tackles everything about XO Cognac, from complex flavour...
January 28^th 2026690 Sponsored article

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20252,5025

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,6355

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,479

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20254,8535

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) for a pie, or...
February 8^th 201848 K 24.6

The bitterness of endives

As I write these lines, we are entering the endive season, and if you like it, it's time to enjoy it, if possible with your local producers. Endive is good, but the reproach that is often made of it, and children in particular, is: "It's bitter! And it is (somewhat) true of course, endives...
February 9^th 201915 K4.9

Drawing a pattern in pastry

Often in the kitchen, in pastry-making, or in baking, we need to trace a pattern on a pastry. It's just a question of aesthetics but it has its effect after baking on a galette, pithiviers, pâté en croute (terrine in a pie crust), etc.
May 23^th 201936 K4.1

The right weight of pastry for a pie

Let's try to solve a thorny problem: How much dough will I need when I make my next pie? You're planning to make a pie, you're going to use your favourite mould or circle, but how much pastry will you need to fill it completely with a well spread pastry, without being too thin, or on the contrary...
March 20^th 202067 K4.3

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202313 K5