When seasoning food, Twin Cities chefs agree: It's better late than never

Several elements go into crafting an outstanding restaurant dish, besides top-notch ingredients. Among them: technique, teamwork — and timing.

Timing is an underrated aspect — especially the endgame. From classic French to contemporary fresh cooking, the last-minute addition of salt, butter, oil, vinegar or fresh herbs can make all the difference, elevating food from good to great.

A friend recently was wowed by a steak at the Butcher's Tale in Minneapolis. Chef Peter Botcher's secret? Clarified butter just before serving.

"You're seasoning at every phase of your cooking," said Eric Schmitt, chef at the Naughty Greek in St. Paul, "but at the end you're looking for total palatability. You want the customer to go, 'Wow, that just touched all four corners of my palate.' "

That can mean adding something rich (butter, oil) or acidic (lemon juice, wine) or earthy (salt, herbs). It can be squeezed, sprinkled or spritzed into a dish or stirred into a sauce. It can even involve an immersion.

Schmitt loves to plop a protein (steak, lamb chop, halibut or other firm fish) into what he calls "a butter bath." But it's really called beurre monté: a little water with a lot of butter plus "whatever you want to put in, tarragon or other fresh herbs, truffle oil, vinegar."

Most late additions, though, aren't quite so immersive. A favorite is quality salt or pepper. Schmitt uses Himalayan salt and peppercorn mélanges frequently, while Joan's in the Park chef Susan Dunlop taps into several varieties for many occasions.

"We use a fleur de sel frequently," she said, "and if you want color and contrast, a Hawaiian black salt on chilled scallops."

While the aesthetics are nice, they're not the main goal.

"The rule of thumb is you don't want to gild the lily," Dunlop said. "It needs to have a purpose to enhance the dish."

Toward that end, Dunlop keeps a mist sprayer of cider vinegar to punch up proteins and sauces and a squeeze bottle of warm brown butter to finish meat or fish. The brown butter, she said, "adds visual contrast and a nutty flavor."

She also employs herb-infused oils — mint and parsley are favorites — for a variety of items on the St. Paul restaurant's ever-changing menu, or small basil leaves to sprinkle atop microgreens. A bread course includes sourdough that gets doused with good olive oil and salt right out of the oven.

And those two elements — using high-quality ingredients and applying them when the food is just coming off the heat — are essential.

Longtime Dakota chef and Le Cordon Bleu instructor Ken Goff has on hand good extra-virgin olive oil when he's sautéing, and even better EVOO for a grand finale, drizzling it on meat, fish and vegetables. Freshly ground sea salt and peppercorns might be additional finishing flourishes.

The aim is to ramp up the flavors, or to "add character," as Goff says, and provide balance rather than having the last bit of augmentation dominate. A harmony of flavors is much easier to achieve — and an ingredient can more easily shine — at the end of the process. "When an herb is layered on top, it's not as integrated, but it's meant to be a very bright, fresh version of the herb."

That's particularly true with slow-cooking soups and braises. Those of us who have added an ample amount of cumin at the outset when making chili often find ourselves a few hours later wondering "where did all that cumin flavor go?" As Dunlop noted, "With something like a beef stew, you want to add some fresh parsley right at the end; otherwise it's just lost."

While this brand of special delivery goes back a ways — "Maitre'd butter on a filet [drizzled at the table] is a couple hundred years old," Goff said — it came to the fore with the nouvelle cuisine movement of the 1970s and '80s.

Rebelling against the rich, heavy French sauces that had dominated the world's fine-dining scene, nouvelle cuisine practitioners emphasized fresh herbs and vegetables, faster cooking times and acidic additives such as lemon juice and vinegar.

The lighter presentations and simpler dishes coalesced with the "California cuisine" that Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower were pioneering in the Bay Area. And while the phrase "nouvelle cuisine" is all but forgotten, the methods endure. Especially in the Twin Cities.

In the early and mid-1980s, chefs such as Lucia Watson, Brenda Langton and Goff showed that local ingredients and a fresh approach could elevate local restaurant fare. Their streamlined approach often included late additions of butter, herbs and other flavor enhancers.

Goff is a big advocate of late steeping: adding butter, salt and pepper into sauces at the very end, letting them sit awhile and then warming them just before serving time.

"With fruit-based sauces for pork or game dishes, I would grind black peppers and stir that in after the cooking was done, just cover and steep like tea and then strain out pulp and other stuff and reheat very gently," he said. "When you're letting it steep, what happens is you end up with the flavor of pepper with almost none of the heat."

And it's not just professional chefs using this tactic. A lot of consumers do, too, pouring olive oil over warm focaccia or flatbread at the table. Or squeezing lemon onto fried fish, calamari and schnitzels. All in the name of flavor and harmony.

Goff learned a similar lesson himself at a Thai restaurant years ago.

"I'd been hearing how good pad thai was," he said, "but I'd eat it and say, 'Oh, that's just fine, but …' And then I saw the lime wedges on the plate, which I had thought were garnish. And I squeezed lime juice over the whole dish and went, 'Omigod, that really lifts it up.' "

As the cliché goes, better late than never.

Here are a few ways home cooks can tap into what was until recently a "chef's secret":

Herbs: In addition to the uses in stated above, consider frying some basil, parsley or sage and topping a meat, vegetable or salad with it. Or use an herb oil (sage, parsley, sage, mint, tarragon) in vinaigrettes and other cooking. While it's not an herb, I love slicing and frying up a fistful of shallots to sprinkle onto fresh heirloom tomatoes.

Lemon: The old song might opine that "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat," but the juice is an extraordinary foodstuff. At the Naughty Greek, "our kebabs are basically resting in fresh lemon juice, and we brush our pita with lemon and olive oil," said chef Eric Schmitt. "In Greece, everything gets hit with late lemon juice." These people know how to live.

Butter: There are multiple uses for compound butter (e.g., thyme and lemon juice mixed in to make maitre'd butter), brown butter (melted over medium-low heat until it turns brown) and clarified butter (heated and having the foam skimmed off and the yellow liquid poured off to leave the milk solids).

Brown butter is a super late addition to roasted or grilled veggies (asparagus, cauliflower, green beans, root vegetables) and pasta. Compound butter loves beef (with horseradish and/or mustard), shellfish, salmon and summer vegetables. Clarified butter is a late hit with pasta and seafood (including for dipping after shellfish is served).

More butter: For beurre monté, Schmitt boils and then turns down ¼ cup of water, then "I put in knobs of butter, cool but not stone cold, and constantly stir." He uses a pound, but a quarter-pound — or 1 stick — will suffice for home cooks; rest steaks, chops or grilled veggies in the emulsion. For the finishing sauces served with chicken or seafood meunière, chef Ken Goff removes the meat, pours off all the fat, and throws "a knot of whole butter into the pan. When it is brown and foamy, splash in a little lemon juice or white wine. It will immediately heave and foam. I pour that evenly over the [protein] right away while it's still active."

Bill Ward is a Twin Cities-based freelance writer.