TAAT©: Taste, Analyze, Adjust and Taste (Again)
01 March 2014
A simple concept conceived by the School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College turned out to be a powerful tool with which to teach culinary-arts students how to achieve impeccable flavor in every dish.
By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE, HAAC
TAAT© is a major initiative that the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts launched in 2007. On the surface, it seems like a pretty obvious and maybe unnecessary teaching tool. After all, everyone tastes the food they eat, at least in theory. Certainly, one would assume that those studying the culinary arts would taste their food. Based on my experience in culinary education over the last decade, however, I am convinced that these assumptions are false. That is where TAAT is proving powerful.
Tasting involves more than ingesting food. True critical tasting involves more than simply declaring one’s like or dislike for a particular food or dish. Tasting in the professional sense involves work and contemplation, which then ideally leads to action. I believe that this lack of taste training is part of American culture. Students in America are schooled to critically think about art and music, but curiously not in the culinary arts, where they should also critically develop their senses of smell and taste. This method instills that analytical rationale in our students.
TAAT is the tasting process from a professional culinary standpoint. The first T represents Taste, meaning that the food must be ingested, chewed, moved around the mouth and swallowed.
The first A is for Analyze, which refers to the conscious part of tasting. Critically thinking about food requires effort, experience and the development of a mental taste library.
The second A is for Adjust. This is the action step. Based on the analysis, the dish might require adjustments to make it as tasty as possible.
The last T is for Taste again—starting the whole process over until perfection is achieved.
What started as a simple idea has become a very useful teaching tool. Posters proclaiming “TAAT” are conspicuously placed in lab and production kitchens throughout the school. When chef instructors taste a student’s work, they will often ask the student if he or she employed TAAT, and if the dish is not successful, which part of TAAT was not performed. This continually reinforces the tasting process. Many students even write “TAAT” as the last step of a recipe, which acknowledges that the tasting process is the ultimate quality control in the culinary arts.
Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE, HAAC is vice president of the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts and vice president of Laureate International Universities Center of Excellence in Culinary Arts. For more information, visit www.kendall.edu