I was reading The Kitchn this week and there was one post that stuck out in my mind. Readers were asking how to learn to cook without recipes. To make stuff up or cook by memory.
I don’t know about you, but I learned to cook at home with my mom. Even so, I’m not good at making Korean food. But that’s not what I learned. I watched my mom cook and I learned to taste stuff as I went along, even if that meant sampling raw meat marinade. She hasn’t died yet of food poisoning and neither have I. Your mileage may vary of course, and it’s a VERY UNSAFE practice, but tasting what you are cooking while you are cooking it is vital. Chopped TV program contestants are routinely criticized by the judges for not tasting their food and adjusting their seasonings as they go.
Another way I learned to cook without recipes was by reading a LOT of recipes. My friend, A, from high school had a collection of cookbooks. She’d get them as presents. We’d read the stuff we thought was interesting and try them out to the letter. Other times, we’d compare a few recipes and cobble something together from the patterns we could discern from the recipes.
Remember, recipes are simply patterns. Patterns that you can tweak and elaborate on till it suits your tastes.
Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Alton Brown and cooking shows on TV have taught me a lot about the food science of cooking. It’s really important to have a sense of what makes combinations work. Memorizing flavors that work together and experimenting with what you enjoy is a lot of fun, but tried and true combinations are usually the base of culinary improv. It’s like your steady bass beat under your crazy riffs.
Here’s a link to the advice the writers at The Kitchn have.
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Thank you so much for pointing me to The Kitchn! I spent a few minutes looking around, and the posts are wonderful. The site is now in my reader, and I hope what I learn will help kick my cooking skills up a notch. Thanks again!
I love improve cooking. Typically I will look at a recipe to get the “core” information such as cook time, base ingredients, etc. But then I will tweak the ingredients to my taste.
I get a lot of joy out of substituting expensive “one time use” ingredients for less expensive ingredients.
I still have a $10 bottle of an exotic spice I bought one time to make Thai Noodles! I found an alternative way to make the noodles using regular household ingredients and they taste great!
I always make a new recipe by the book the very first time. That way, I can tweak and adapt to my taste after that and have a comparison with the original.