More Simple Ideas!

To my mind, this is the ultimate in culinary adventure. With a mere handful of different herbs and spices you can create a nearly endless variety of healthy gourmet dishes. If you follow the model below you will be able to do the same in no time at all.

Your starting point is – knowing your team intimately which is discussed in detail in

Step 3 of our Master Cooking with Herbs – in 4 Simple Steps home-study course. When you have the distinctive taste of each herb on the tip of your tongue, so to speak, group them into general categories according to flavour and strength. I like to group according to strength and I use only two groups, mild and robust. Within my mild group I have a sub-group which I call fusion herbs, but more about them later.

The two groups loosely follow the annual and perennial classification and I don’t necessarily group according to the taste of raw leaves either.

Mild herbs have the following characteristics:

• They combine well with most other herbs.

• Their flavours often become milder in cooking.

• Often used in larger quantities, and with more variation than robust herbs.

• Several of them can be combined, if their flavours are complementary.

• Often appear in salads and dishes in which the leaves are used raw, or cooked only briefly.

• Good examples are: basil, bay leaf, chervil, dill, marjoram and parsley.

Robust herbs have the following characteristics:

• They stand up well to cooking. Often used together, or alone, for braised or roasted meat or poultry, grilled foods, and long simmered dishes, especially soups and stews.

• With the exception of garlic they combine with just a few other robust herbs.

• Their flavours are subtly altered during cooking, sometimes muting, sometimes intensifying.

• They can be combined judiciously with basil, marjoram and other mild herbs.

• Good examples are: garlic, oregano, rosemary, sage, sorrel, tarragon and thyme.

Basic to this bouquet garni technique is the "fusion herbs". These are mild herbs which seem to help other flavours mingle together without screaming at one another. Although some of them have assertive flavours themselves, they don’t seem to overpower other herbs, or other ingredients in the dish.

Good examples of liaison herbs are bay leaf, parsley (especially Italian parsley), chervil, chives and marjoram. If you are a newcomer to cooking with herbs these 5 fusion herbs are a very good starting point for your herb collection.

The above loose classification will assist you in blending herbs of different strengths without your diners being able to pick out any single flavour in the final dish. Remember your aim in making a good bouquet garni is to have the diner take another bite, not analyse the dish.

Proportions are important

The proportions of the different herbs in the bouquet garni are important. Equal parts of both robust and mild herbs would result in the robust herbs masking the mild ones. If you were to use equal parts of just robust herbs they would cancel each other out. You get the picture.

Finding the correct proportions can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, but over the years I’ve develop a loose proportion guide which you can use whenever you start working on a new bouquet garni. It looks as follows:

• Fusion herbs – 6 parts in total

• Mild herbs – 4 parts in total

• Robust herbs – 2 parts in total

• Other flavourings – 1 part in total

In our home-study course “Master Cooking With Herbs – in 4 Simple Steps” we share some examples to help you get the feel for this advanced technique.

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