I noticed that David Chang likes to add a bit of agave nectar to his fried rice. I never thought about adding something sweet to this, so I started adding a small amount of brown sugar (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 tsp) to my fried rice, and it really seems to make it tastier. It doesn’t read as “sweet” - it just gives it a tiny bit of an additional flavor boost. Since then I’ve also tried playing around with adding a tiny amount of sugar to other things, and it’s usually pretty good.
My brother and I were trying to replicate my grandmother’s curry recipe after she passed and got close but something was off. We couldn’t pin it down for years until one day my mother mistook the sugar for salt and added a tablespoon of it to the curry. We were amazed cause it now tasted exactly like grandma’s. You couldn’t taste the sugar, but it just rounded out all the other flavors. So now when there’s a thing that’s missing and I’m stumped, I try a bit of sugar and it’s usually the answer.
It’s funny how it’s hard to tell what isn’t there sometimes, right? I left salt out of a dessert a few times and it just didn’t taste right. I had to go back through my steps to realize that I’d forgotten the salt.