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How to season anything with five flavours plus pain

The five flavours are:

Sweet best flavour
Salty
Sour
Bitter
Umami

To this we can add, where appropriate, element X: masochism (spicy).

You want to season a thing—a salad, stir-fried vegetables, cookies doesn’t matter. Consider what flavours it’s already strong in, and add the ones it lacks.

For example, potatoes baked with skin get some bitter from the skin. So if you add salt, lime juice, MSG, and a pinch of sugar, they’ll be delicious.

Most of us were taught to recoil at the idea of putting sugar in savoury foods, or salty spicy seasonings on sweets. Yet that addictive paprika powder in Pringles has sugar in it. A small pinch of sugar won’t make it taste sweet-sour, it will just bring out the savoury tastes, and vice-versa. Adjust to your tastes and common sense.

Some simple ways to fill in each of the flavours:

Sweet: sugar, brown sugar, dandelion jelly, liquorice, maple syrup, other syrups
Salty: kosher salt, sea salt, coarse salt, seasoned salts
Umami: MSG, dried tomatoes, mushrooms, onion powder, nutritional yeast
Sour: vinegars, lime/lemon juice, citric acid powder
Bitter: mustard, fenugreek, roast sesame, bay leaf, thyme, roast garlic, coffee, tea, matcha, or for the bitterness connoisseuses, wormwood, mugwort, angelica.

Pain: chillis of all kinds, ginger, wasabi, raw garlic, raw onions, chipotle.
For extra fun pain: Fry Sichuan peppercorns in sesame or peanut oil; remove the corns when they're well-toasted, and add fresh diced chilis. This is málà (drug-spicy) oil, and anything you stir-fry in it will be ♥interesting. If spiciness is masochism, think of Sichian peppers (or Brazilian jambu) as the equivalent of those sensation-enhancing sex creams.

Notice that several of these basic seasonings have other elements in them (mustard sauces, garlic flakes and onion powder often have added salt, for example, and roast garlic is umamy). Some popular sauces serve to close multiple gaps at once:

Salty+umami: shoyu, miso, Worcestershire, Vegemite, barbecue, tamari, teriyaki, many other thick/fermented salty sauces
Sour+sweet: ketchup, orange/tangerine/mandarin juice, sweet-sour dips
Spicy-sour: Western-style sriracha (if it’s Viet-style sriracha, then it’s spicy-everything, including sweet)
Sour with a bit of spicy: Tabasco-style jalapeño sauces
Spicy-salty-bitter: shichimi
usw...

This is not the complete model of all flavourings, of course. Any specific spice like thyme or cardamom will have its own special personality that can’t be reduced to five attribute levels in a character sheet. The usefulness of this model is more in suggesting what else to add when you don’t have anything specific in mind. You’re oven-roasting tomatoes, they’re already sour and umami, you added salt ofc, look around your cabinets for what you have at hand, maybe put some rosemary and garlic flakes for the bitter, hmm a light touch of maple syrup?