We can learn from Ayurvedic practices to better balance our meals across all six tastes by imagining we are building a campfire. Because our digestive processes are influenced by the fire element, it’s important to look at meal-building as an exercise in sparking, tending, and tempering the fiery aspects of our food.

5 elemental ingredients:

Space, Air, Fire, Water, Earth

6 taste profiles:
Sweet, Sour, Salty, Astringent, Pungent, Bitter

In Ayurvedic thought, everything from our personality type to our source of nourishment is influenced by how elements combine. These basic elements—primarily fire—also drive how we assemble a meal. Foods feature six tastes that fuel, fan, or subdue the element of fire. Explore their connection with this exercise.

• Build up Tinder
  Spices and salty flavors are the tinder that prime the fire site for what follows.
  The aperitif in this chapter’s menu ignites hearts and stomachs with a bright bump of happiness.
• Feed the Flame
  Following the starters, add hearty, sweet-natured foods, like root vegetables or meat, for the fire to consume and build strength. Pungent (like our trio of chutneys), salty, and sour flavors reset your palate and feed the flames.
• Add Logs
  Progressively layer heavier flavors of sweet (animal-based) or astringent (plant-based) proteins. This is the food equivalent of logs in the form of proteins and fats. Kichari’s hearty and homey combination of lentils and grains invites us to scoop up a bowl of comfort and gather to share joys and set down our burdens for a precious moment of connection and color.
• Leave Room for Air
  Astringent foods give us an opportunity for space in the meal. Space lets us pause, pace ourselves, and be present.
• Simmer
  To close the fire, we feed it flavors that taper cravings. Serving the salad course later in the meal brings us to a slow simmer to process our food with airy, light greens and vegetables. Digestion burns a little less hot when we leave the protein behind.
• Extinguish the Embers
  The little embers glow at the end of a meal just enough for a small bite of something sweet like our Cacao & Medjool Date Dessert Balls. A soothing Ginger Elixir offers a warm hug at dinner’s end, dousing inflammation and leaving us with the warm cinders of an evening fueled by love.