Raw Nature savours

I have experienced a savour i never particularly paid attention to today - rosemary sap. I add some simple pasta with herbs, and just went in the garden to pick up some fresh rosemary and cut it as is on the pasta, without any cooking of the herbs.
The flavour of the rosemary is well-known to everyone, but thist ime as the herb was really fresh and raw-uncooked, the flavour of the sap was present. It is a lovely feeling to taste nature, to taste these raw flavours that are not specifically savours of traditional cooking but precisely of raw nature.
One of these i would love to experience is earthiness. Not as you find it in a wine, which shows earthy savoury characters, not raw forest floor, this lovely aromas you smell when you walk in a forest after the rain. Not mushroom, no, that complexe forest floor after the rain full aroma.
I hear your sarcastic thoughts: the best way is maybe to put my nose in the forest floor and eat whatever dirt comes to hand. Wouldn't that be too simple and actually not enjoyable? Not what i'm after.
But i'm sure they would be a way to produce these kind of 'raw nature' savours in an real food experience (or experimentation). Let me know if you come close to something like that...

The magic of wine & food matching

Have you ever experienced that perfect wine & food match? You've most certainly heard about it, and might even have doubt about the magic of it. Well, I was thinking exactly the same - right, red goes with meat, white with fish, light red on a salmon, tannic red on a game, try white wine with cheese, but red with a camembert, dessert wine on a blue etc. commun statements of wine & food matching (let's agree on the short W&F M). Never really convinced about the caracteres that could make it such a special thing. I also had in mind the fact that i needed great food and great wine, to achieve a perfect W&F M.

All wrong! I understood it that day, a day like any other day, when i had that wonderful surprise. The perfect W&F M. I was in a little cafe, nothing fancy about it, and i ordered a mud cake. As good as a mud cake can be, this chocolate cake from that little place had absolutely nothing special about it. To accompany it, i had a syrah, syrah from NZ not even from the region where i was or from a region known for its syrah - a simple syrah from Nelson, good, well made but nothing fancy about it, not the kind you would remember. However, i had a piece of that cake, and then a sip of that syrah... simply magic.
The length of flavours of the cake was melting with the mid palate of the syrah, and then the length of the syrah or end of mouth, melting with the mid palate of the cake, and one was calling for the other. And i could just not stop going from the cake to the wine to the cake to the wine, until both my plate and my glass were empty.
Flavours and aromas was just perfectly matching, the slight spices in the cake (cinnamon) and the spice of the syrah (pepper) were completing each other, the flavours were completing each other, chocolate on one side and cherries on the other side were meeting and joigning forces, the texture of the cake was helped by the sligt acidity and the soft although present tannic structure of the syrah, and finally the length of both were playing with each other calling for an 'encore'. Nothing was too much, nothing not enough. And the most surprising: the perfect match came from two absolutely commun products. Nothing wonderful about them when tasted on their own, but together it was a the perfect combination - a new ONE coming from two ones.

It is that experience that i want to live again and profoundly want to understand. In cooking, the idea is the same: take 2 products, as not noble as they can be, and combine them. If they flavour wise go together, if they are cooked to match their texture and their length in mouth... you obtain this magic combination. Molecular gastronomy explains you that in cooking. There is a way to explain it in wine and food matching, more cartesian that a simple description as done above. I'm not looking for a table of unbreakable rules, i'm looking for basic principles that will make people live that moment I've lived. The kind of moment that makes you forget time and space, and makes you feel excited and peaceful at the same time. Sounds crazy i know.