It would be a shame choosing one perfume or flavor as my favourite, putting it before all others, and yet there is one flavour which is for me more important than any other. It is the flavour heritage.
The flavour of memories is so unique that every country, every place and even every person develops their own flavour profile. It’s a great pleasure travelling around the world and getting to know the flavours of different regions and cultures. I believe this is an incredible treasure that needs to be protected and taken care of by every single person and every region.
With our flavour heritage we can touch every person and provoke the recalling of their own memories. Diversity of people, regions and countries makes it impossible to capture all the flavours in a recipe. There are too many factors which are impossible to capture into a cooking formula – for example the surroundings, people with who we are sharing the flavours in that special moment of time …
I find it very important to teach our own children how to deal with food – with lots of love, care and fun. All this together develops the flavour heritage of people/children. It’s a great challenge to awake these memories of flavours and another challenge to get these flavours to develop further, to become open to discoveries of something new, something limitless, have fun cooking and creating new flavour heritage for the future.
Just have a look at the happiness of a child discovering a new simple flavour – honey (sweet) in combination with bread (sour). We should keep this feeling of happiness and wonder life long.
I was lucky for being born into a family where the simplicity of very special ingredients played an important role. This has developed my personal taste and is creating my own flavour heritage which I hope to be able to pass on to my own children.
For the future of the cooking profession it’s very important to involve children into tasting of everything that surrounds them. They will be the carriers of our flavours when we will not be here anymore.
In this sense is my favourite flavour my mother’s merit. There is no better way to provoke the further development of my love for cooking, to inspire me or to grant me a moment of happiness and peace.
Lukas Nagl, Restaurant Bootshaus (Traunkirchen, Austria)
