Salmon skin, raspberry doughnuts, Alma’s kitchen rules and pop-up profanity at the Taste

If you weren’t lucky enough (or temporarily unpolished enough) to reach your hand in for a piece of buttery, rare salmon, bite into a warm raspberry-filled doughnut or listen in on a panel discussing (with not a few obscenities) the power of the pop-up, we bring you highlights of a maddeningly hot day at the Taste, where L.A. chefs cooked, spoke and served and we ate, drank and listened.

“We really love watching people take a bite of food and forget they’re in a restaurant,” Alma chef Ari Taymor said during a cooking demonstration of lavender-smoked duck with corn and blackberries.

Recipes, tongs and black pepper are not used at Alma, Taymor’s downtown L.A. kitchen that was recently named best new restaurant by Bon Appetit magazine. No recipes because cooks create through interpretation. No tongs because they cut into the flesh of meat. (“We want to be mindful of an animal that’s given its life.) And black pepper’s “extremely astringent pungent quality” disqualifies it as a base seasoning.

PHOTOS: Great dishes amid the heat at the Taste

If you’re making doughnuts you don’t need to cut the dough into circles before frying, says pastry chef Sherry Yard. You can cut them into squares and they’ll still fry up into circles. That’s not only one less tool to use but you don’t have to deal with rerolling scraps.

Michael Cimirusti of Providence (named L.A.’s best restaurant by Times critic Jonathan Gold) said the most flavorful part of fish is the skin. He made wild salmon and, to be sure, that crust shattered like a potato chip and tasted even better.

To test for doneness, all line cooks at Providence and his newest, Connie and Ted’s -- an upscale clam-shack restaurant -- use cake testers, which cost about 99 cents and are really nothing more than thin wires. The wire pierces a piece of fish and is put up to the lip of a cook to test for heat.

Photos: Great dishes amid the heat at The Taste

Running a pop-up restaurant is like crashing on a friend’s couch, according to Nguyen Tran of Starry Kitchen and Gary Menes of Le Comptoir. They were on a panel dedicated to pop-ups with Craig Thornton of the underground dinner series Wolvesmouth and led by Gold. “After a while, you both just need your space,” Menes said.

That Wolvesmouth has become an exclusive dining experience that’s almost impossible to get into (there’s a waiting list and the owner of that list is sort of a secret) was never Thornton’s intention. “The whole idea was to create an intimate environment,” he said. “Unfortunately I’m only one person.”

A pop-up’s smaller size is good and bad for chefs, Menes said.

“I get to see your reactions,” he said. “I’m a little scared as well. I don’t know how you’re going to react.”

There were more insights to offer, we’re sure, but those got lost somewhere between Inn of the Seventh Ray’s uni and corn chawanmushi (custard) and the beer garden.

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Photos: Great dishes amid the heat at the Taste

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