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What are some good guidelines for flavor? I am a new WFPB cook & regularly disappointed with bland tasting food.

Beyond Recipes

Deb Kennedy, PhD - Beyond Recipes

Recorded

This event was on March 6, 2025

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Question

sheri meigs

What are some good guidelines for flavor? I am a new WFPB cook & regularly disappointed with bland tasting food.

Answer

No, no, no, no, no. Sherry. So a couple of things. Go become a food coach, but I see that half jokingly. But this is what we teach in the Food Coach Academy. Get those cookbooks, uh, the cookbooks that I'm gonna show you, but also the two books that came out from Clinic to Kitchen. It shows you exactly how to add the flavor because what I am all about is basically making healthy food delicious. Because if we can't do that, we're not going to improve people's health in any way if we can't make them incredibly delicious and we can. It absolutely is possible and probable once you know how to do it. So you wanna make sure there's a source of acid in your food. So that's lemon lime vinegars. When you're cooking, you wanna add herbs and spices. Uh, I'm not sure if you do oils or not, but you could perhaps do a flavored oil so you don't have to use much of it. And the cooking techniques. So if you're making, uh, vegetables instead of having this, this carrot right here, what you can do is you can roast the carrot, it becomes caramelized and then it becomes delicious. So there definitely are culinary techniques that you can learn to do easily and it can make your food just incredibly delicious.

Deb Kennedy, PhD

PhD Nutritionist

drdebkennedy.com

*Deb Kennedy, PhD* nutritionist, chef and Value-Based Medicine certified, is dedicated to helping people improve their health through food. She received her Ph.D. in Nutritional Biochemistry from Tufts University, and previously held roles with Tufts Human Nutrition Research Center for Aging, Yale’s Prevention Research Center, Babies and Children’s Hospital at New York Presbyterian, Cornell University, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. She also held the position of first Chair for Best Practices at the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative (CIA) and was an instructor in Culinary Nutrition at the New England Culinary Institute. A pioneer in the growing field of culinary medicine, and self-proclaimed food warrior, Dr. Kennedy is the author of multiple books, including The Culinary Medicine Textbook, a five-volume publication to date that uses her research in food, flavor, eating and nutrition to lay out the concepts and fundamental topics needed to master culinary medicine. For the last several years, Deb, along with 40 nutritionists and a dozen chefs from around the world, created culinary competencies for nutrition recommendations. She has developed the Food Coach Academy based on this work, which is delivered in a science-based modular format that provides individuals with expertise needed to use the power of food to transform health.