I picked up a new book and a new salad

I got a new book from my wonderful wife for Xmas. The Flavor Bible by Keren Page and Andrew Dornenburg has culinarily opened my eyes. After years of experimenting and attempting to mimic the greats of cooking, These two authors have condensed hundreds of years of food pairings and flavor knowledge of the greats into an elegant, perfect flavor reference.

I found a simple pear with bleu cheese salad and started to add anything I could that referenced well in The Flavor Bible. Ultimately this is what I came up with

Pear Gorgonzola salad with toasted walnuts and port soaked raisins and a honey Dijon vinaigrette

Contents of salad and reference flavor to pear
1. Pears cored and sliced into quarters and each quarter mandolin sliced to 1.3mm thick

2. Port soaked raisins (Raisins and Port both major flavor resonators) *if you don't have any sweet red wine to soak the raisins sweeten a dry wine (red or white but red is better) with sugar, the raisins must be soaked else they are like little rocks in the salad

3. Walnuts toasted with a touch of oil, a slight browning at the contact points is expected(Walnuts are a major flavor resonator)

4. Crumbled Gorgonzola (all bleu cheese are major flavor resonators to pear so any bleu will do) *crumble the cheese finely else the footieness gets overpowering

5. A lite spring mix of lettuce, keep the green mix light like an HEB baby spring lettuce mix, nothing with strong flavors


honey Dijon recipe
1 tbs Dijon mustard (Minor)
2 tsp honey (Major)
juice of 1 lemon (strained) (Major)
salt
pepper
1/4c olive oil (Minor)
stick-blend the crap out of it


Almost every flavor used references pears to some degree and even reference each other if you start researching the individual ingredients. Together these make a wonderful combination of tart, sweet, saltiness, creaminess and texture. This book will forever be my flavor sanity check. If I am making something new from my own creative juices or a recipe I found somewhere this book will always be at my right hand.