In the daily challenge of cooking meals for your family, home cooking recipes can be a help or a hindrance. How recipes work for you depends on what you expect them to tell you. Remember, recipes are good at telling you some things, but don’t help you with an overall kitchen culinary journey. If this is what you’re expecting, if you’re expecting guidance that will help you to become a master chef in your home, you will be disappointed.
Here is a review of some of the things that recipes don’t tell you about cooking meals at home:
- Variations in ingredients or potential substitutions
- Variations in measurements or how to handle mistakes in measuring
- Variations in different oven and stoves and their varying temperatures
- Variations in time or how to tell EXACTLY when the meal is cooked
- Why you are taking the steps that you are being asked to take so you can make educated decisions
In fact, recipes are best used as a guide for cooking meals just as a musician uses sheet music as a guide for playing music. But if you think about the musician that reads sheet music, they already know how to play an instrument and they can bring the sheet music to life. In the same way, in order to bring a recipe to life, in many respects, you already need know how to cook or at least understand several different cooking methods.
Have you ever heard a cover version of a favorite song? This happened to me recently. I happen to be a fan of Counting Crows and their song, Mr. Jones. Someone else had reinterpreted the song and was singing it as though it were a poem. I was upset! It just didn’t sound the same, but obviously, the musician had put his own spin on it and it may sound great to him and his fans.
So, if you understand how to cook and how to use recipes as an inspiration for your interpretation, you can overcome the things that the recipes don’t tell you about cooking meals at home. You’ll have power, strength and confidence to make the recipe come to life in your personal kitchen culinary vision.
Here are some ways to use recipes to your advantage:
Ingredients – Become familiar with families of ingredients so you can make substitutions. Here are a few examples:
- spinach for escarole
- carrots for daikon
- ostrich for steak
Measurements – forget measurements, cook by how the food looks to you and how it tastes. In your desire to complete the dish as the recipe defines it, you are being distracted from the art of cooking, from enjoying and developing your kitchen culinary skills. Remember, the cookbook doesn’t know your kitchen, you do. The recipes doesn’t know how you like your meals to taste, but you do. So take back control and stop measuring.
Variations in oven temps and times – forget about temperatures and times. Even if you’ve already cooked the recipe at your mom’s house or your best friends house, you can’t rely on the stated temperature.
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I have never followed a recipe, it is just there for reference. I may omit this ingredient or may add something else that the recipe doesn’t call for. I can follow a recipe and have it come out great but I do not want to be restricted, I like being The Kitchen Sink Chef, get whatever and just throw together and have a great tasting meal.
Hi Christopher!
“By George, I think you’ve got it!” (lol) You’re thinking like a great cook. Use the recipes for ideas and inspirations, but don’t trust their step-by-step instructions. That’s not how a free-thinking creative cook works.
You are soooooooo right. I used to write a recipe column for my Expat women’s group and when I found a new and interesting recipe I would try it out myself first. Unfortunately sometimes I did not have the requested ingredients and would substiute with what I had. The results were always incredibly good so much so that I forgot they were ‘substiutes’ and actually acused the editor of changing my recipes!
Cooking is an art, you can create as you go along.
Thanks for your tips.
Thanks for your kind comments Maria.
Chef Todd,
After learning some of these basic cooking methods from your basic course, I’ve gone through and revamped many of the cookbook recipes that I always wanted to have work but never did until now. Thank you!! These dishes have far more flavor and look great, too, according to how I want to cook them.
You’ve taken back the power, Kathleen! Now YOU have control over written recipes, that’s fantastic! I LOVE when someone has the “lightbulb” go off and start to realize they can alter things for their own desires. You’ve discovered this, and now you’re eating better.
Thanks for sharing your great news!
On Thing that you missed is high altiude cooking I live over
six thousand feet above level
Very true, Jim.
Water boils at a different temperature at higher altitudes, effecting baking in particular, but also the rate at which sauces reduce and stocks simmer.