A lot of people settle into a palette that doesn’t really change that much from year to year. We get into our comfort zones and find the foods that we like, but it can end up limiting our experiences of food, and stop us from finding brand new favorites. Here, we’re going to look at a few ways to better challenge your palette, get some culinary clout under your belt and make sure you’re not stuck in a gourmet rut.

Try new tastes

The biggest and earliest challenge that a lot of people have with their palette is that they’re missing the ability to enjoy certain kinds of tastes. For instance, there are plenty of people who aren’t too fond of spicy food, often because they haven’t found the right flavor that can make it much more palatable for them. Similarly, a lot of people don’t know how to make good use of umami flavors, or how to mix savory and sweet well. Finding these blind spots in your own culinary experience can help you develop a direction to start broadening your horizons.

Try new ingredients

If you’re going to expand your culinary repertoire while also discovering new tastes, one of the best ways is to find new ingredients that you have maybe never used before or perhaps only found limited use for, and exploring the many different ways you can cook with it. For instance, it’s often said that you can tell the range of a cook by the many different ways they can cook an egg. However, you can go a lot further than eggs with it, exploring all manner of ingredients.

Try new cuisines

One of the easiest ways to find a range of new tastes to try is to throw yourself into a brand new cuisine. Perhaps you already have a kind of Mediterranean food that you already like and you would like to expand that taste into something broader. Diving into a new culture or region’s cuisine with little to no knowledge of it can be exciting, as well. It can be difficult for anyone not of a culture to learn to truly master its cuisine, but it can definitely help you not only learn new recipes but better inform your own recipes with new twists.

Try new restaurants

If you’re less certain about trying to cook entirely new tastes from scratch, then you might want to see how it’s done by the pros, instead. There are plenty of online restaurant listings that can help you find the best offerings of a range of cuisines and cooking styles in your area. Take the time to explore the different tastes around you, and see if you can’t pick up any recipes or meals that you can try to recreate at home. 

If you want to be a real gourmand, then you need to be willing to continuously try new things. Not only will it help you better enjoy your food, but it can make you a much more versatile cook, too.