There must be a term:
When a flavorful ingredient releases its flavor into the entire mixture. Example: crushed fresh herbs release their favor into a mixture of other ingredients.
Last night: I’m making a room temperature sauce for pasta with prosciutto, roquefort (or gorgonzola), walnuts, fresh garlic, cheese, cracked pepper, olive oil. One of the ingredients is rosemary, from my old bush near the blue hydrangea. My friend brought in a nice stem of rosemary for me to chop, chop, chop into fineness and drop into the big bowl with the garlic and oil, the cracked pepper, the prosciutto, and gorgonzola. She immediately commented that she couldn’t smell or even taste the rosemary in the mixture. (I’ve made this pasta dish scores of times since the early 80’s). "It will be fine. The rosemary will release its flavor into the rest of the mixture...in time."
And that’s when we tried to think of what the term might be for when you add a flavor, and then in time it actually is flavoring the concoction. Flavor Explosion? Flavor release? Nope. We Googled and we Safari-ed and we tried every kind of permutation of the question and could find nothing....but we were referred to your site. "SURELY these people would know!!"
Can you help? We would be ever so grateful. We're so curious! There seems to be a term in French for nearly every action or product in cooking. "Suffuse" could work, except that it qualifies the mixture, showing what is happening to IT: "The cream was suffused with flavor of the grasses in the cows' pasture."
What word/term identifies what the grasses are doing? "The grasses _______ the cream with their distinctive flavor."
In an hour, the fragrance of fresh rosemary was obvious in the rich mixture. And by the time the rigatoni was drained, and the room temperature mixture was tossed with it, all the flavors played like lovely chords in a composition.
