“Burn your recipes!” If you’ve been following me for any amount of time now, you’ve heard me utter that statement time and time again. It’s not that I’m entirely against using recipes for home cooking, it’s more because I see cooking meals as a personal art form or your kitchen culinary expression.
In fact, home cooking recipes are especially useful if you’re looking for new ideas and flavor combinations. Recipes are useful for cooking meals if you want to try to duplicate something exactly.
Here are some of the things that recipes will tell you:
- The ingredients to use
- The correct weights and measures for the ingredients
- The temperatures and degrees to use
- How much time you should cook
- What steps to take and when
But, you can’t expect recipes to tell you everything that you need to know to make the meal come to life. I like to make analogies between cooking and music. Let’s take sheet music for example. There are things that sheet music doesn’t tell the piano player. There are variations in tone, pace, and interpretation. The musician has to bring the music to life through his or her own interpretation of the music that they are reading.
Here are some of the things that recipes don’t tell you:
- Variations in ingredients/substitutions
- Variations in measurements/ mistakes in measuring
- Variations in oven temps/stove temps
- Variations in time
- Why you are taking the steps you are taking
There are very few celebrity chefs that I enjoy. An exception is Alton Brown. I enjoy Alton Brown’s show because he also explains why he’s taking the steps he’s taking as well as how different ingredients, temperatures, etc. affect the food that you cook. One day when I was watching Alton, he was cooking a popover recipe that looked great. As I was watching, I thought that the amount of salt he used would make it too salty for me. But, when I tried to make the recipe, I used his exact measurements because, well, he’s Alton Brown. Turns out the popovers were WAY too salty!
Next time, I’ll take out some of my own recipe books I use for inspiration and point out some of the ways that I know the recipe book is broken. My goal is to help you to increase your kitchen culinary skills by using your home cooking recipes to cook meals that you can be proud of again and again.
Make sure and comment below on how you’ve been misled before by something you read (or didn’t read) in a recipe! I love hearing those stories because we’ve all got them!
One of my favorite things to do while growing up was to cook with my Italian grandma. Her recipes always said “cook until done”. She knew when food was done by looking at it, smelling it, and tasting it. That always amazed me, and I need to get better at doing that.
Hi Ginny!
Your Grandmother gave you one of the best gifts you can give a child, the respect and appreciation of food and the home kitchen.
She cooked by basic methods that she could repeat again and again. Because she was confident in these methods, “She knew when food was done by looking at it, smelling it, and tasting it.”
That’s the point I want to get all my WebCookingClasses students to, the ability to cook with observable methods so you can look at it, smell it, taste it and KNOW it’s a great meal.
I was crazy about coconut and cake until i made a coconut cake from a cookbook that was insanely greasy. The kind of where you eat a few mouthfuls and you have enough of (i know, for some people that is what cake should be like; however, I’m the kind of person who likes to eat the whole cake by myself and then feel great – grandma’s fruit cake comes to mind). It was actually edible (the coconut cake) and was consequently eaten, however, my mind learned to stay clear of both cake and coconut subconsciously for years after that, it was almost as if i’d made allergic to it, I just felt sick if someone mentioned either.
I totally understand the recipes for inspiration though. Since then I became a flexitarian (part time vegan lol). When you look for vegan recipes, you learn pretty quick there are about 3 recipes on the whole internet that you like. This makes about 1.5 that you have access to ingredients for. So i started improvising. Mostly I just learned to eat lousy food, as I never know what a good substitution would actually be 😛
I see you don’t like celebrity chefs, but the Masterchef series (Gordon Ramsay) actually got me thinking more about that I could possibly make good food someday. The show is totally over the top but I find it funny (kinda like watching Jackass sometimes :P). It is true that in other shows Ramsay just seems to keep on cooking chicken, and this gets old quickly to me -.-‘
Hi Barbara!
Becoming a creative, free-thinking cooking is a journey more than a destination. With all my years of teaching and the list of credentials I have, I still learn from other people every day. It’s not that I personally don’t like the chefs that have become celebrities…I don’t like celebrity chefs that focus on entertaining people rather than educating. In each of these TV shows, there’s a METHOD to cooking they don’t reveal to you, just the WHAT to cook…not the HOW.
You’ll see that my WebCookingClasses are different than ALL other cooking instruction. I focus on the methods, not the ingredients. That way, you can cook anything you want.
Yes, I. Have maded something new. said if l make it again I would change different ingredients.