Taste With Your Tongue: Cooking Through the Six Flavors with Ed Brown

This is a multi-week online course, not a residential retreat. Edward Espe Brown teaches cooking as a study of attention: the calendar description frames the whole course as “taste as careful attention,” carried out through guided tasting practices. The title is the instruction — taste directly on the tongue rather than going by what you assume an ingredient tastes like.

The course material is specific. Participants work through two schemas:

• The six flavors: salt, sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, and plain
• The three broad tastes: earth, stem/leaf, and flower/fruit

The inclusion of “plain” as a flavor says a good deal about the approach — this is about noticing what is actually present in an ingredient, including when nothing much is. The stated aim is slowing down enough to notice how each ingredient changes what is already there, tasted directly rather than read off a recipe.

Format, cost, and what’s not published

The course lists at $210 and is hosted by Green Gulch Farm Zen Center (Green Dragon Temple) through its calendar at sfzc.org. Beyond that, the listing is thin: no session times, no word on whether meetings are live or recorded, no list of what to have on hand for the tasting exercises, and no teacher biography. Those details should come from the registration page or from the center directly.