Nadia Aidi's Go-To Ingredient For Improving Any Dish, Sweet Or Savory

Elevating home-cooked dishes to restaurant quality is often easier than you imagine. While professional high-heat stoves and using large amounts of delicious fats like butter are probably best left to restaurants, your homemade dishes can benefit greatly from just using high-quality, fresh ingredients (whenever possible) and seasoning correctly. Even a simple dish like tuna salad can be elevated to restaurant-level fare with a few easy modifications. In general, one of the best things you can do to raise your cooking game is to understand how to balance flavors. Besides helping each dish stand out, well-balanced flavors can also help people want to eat more because they don't get palate fatigue. If you've ever delved into a stack of pancakes but found the sweetness growing tiresome, try adding tart jam or even a little lemon juice. You'll be less likely to get overwhelmed by the monotonous sweet flavor.

Unfortunately, lemon juice has too strong a flavor to use in every dish. To find the perfect flavor-balancing ingredient that can improve a variety of dishes, we caught up with chef Nadia Aidi at New York City Wine & Food Festival's FoodieCon. In addition to developing gourmet recipes that are simple enough to make at home, Aidi also cooks live for her sizable Instagram audience under her handle @‌foodmymuse. Her go-to ingredient of miso paste is a versatile flavor balancer, asits earthy, umami notes complement spicy, acidic, and even sweet ingredients marvelously.

While you may have considered miso, essentially fermented soybean paste, as limited to Asian cuisine, the it's actually one of the most versatile flavor-boosters out there. "Miso is a really good one," says Nadia Aidi, "because it's relatively neutral. It can have some sweet notes. It can have some savory notes. Not all miso, obviously. Like the white miso (is) my go-to neutral. And the amounts. You have to play with that because otherwise, it gets super salty."

While adding miso to sweet dishes requires a particularly neutral miso paste, savory dishes are more forgiving. In addition to miso paste, Aidi has a host of other ingredients she likes to use. "Umami makes everything better: miso, anchovies, tomato paste. Some people roast me because I add soy sauce to my tomato-based sauces, (but) it makes it so good." We recommend going a step further by adding fish sauce to give your tomato sauce that umami oomph.

Miso is relatively easy to find, but in a pinch, you can also use peanut butter. The deep earthy notes can help balance flavors in both sweet and savory dishes. In fact, you can use an empty jar of peanut butter for a savory sauce to use up any bits stuck to the jar's bottom. Remember that in most dishes, a little bit of umami goes a long way, so unless you're making a dish that is specifically miso-flavored (like a rich miso broth), a teaspoon or two of the paste will be all you need.