I generally regard recipes as inspiration and/or rough guidelines. My dish will generally have most of the ingredients the recipe mentions, but beyond that, I mostly improvise. Even the first time I make a dish, I usually change things, unless I expect it to be especially sensitive to proportions. I tend not to measure things much. I cook largely by scent, combining things until they smell “right”, and secondarily by sight and taste.
I don’t hold recipe-following against anyone, but I do sometimes find the efforts of certain recipe-followers to measure things ever so precisely a little funny. From the way one friend of mine cooks, you’d think he expected the dish to explode if, say, his quarter teaspoon of nutmeg isn’t exactly level. Conversely, it drives him up the wall when I just dump stuff in without measuring, and everything turns out fine. He’s tried more than once to capture recipes he can duplicate by watching me cook things, but it never seems to work for him.
If I find a recipe I like I will follow it for the first few times until I get a feel for how to make it, after which I tend to wing it a bit with regards to ingredients and amounts.
Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to share recipes with people cuz my brain only knows ‘some chicken, lots of mushrooms, cut up the pears, pour balsamic vinegar for about this long’.
This is me in a nutshell
That being said, in my experience there are people who can wing it and the end product will turn out great, and there are people who need to follow a recipe or the result will be a disaster.
My little sisters can just throw stuff into a pot and it’s fantastic. My little brother can’t make scrambled eggs without guidance and at family gatherings is put in charge of the drinks and ice.
That kind of takes the convenience out of putting it in the oven and leaving it for a few hours, but you’re right. It also could set you up to burn the bottom a little bit. Regardless, asking for quantities doesn’t seem like a weird question to me at all.
ETA: It just occurred to me that I essentially restated your whole post.
Like most people with experience, I do a combination of things. I started out by following recipes exactly. That’s what taught me what works and what doesn’t. I will still follow a recipe if I haven’t made something before, but can now tweak it if I don’t like what I’m seeing for ingredients. For something like paella, I will often have three different recipes in front of me, plus I’m winging it to some extent. And of course some things, like chili, are different every time, depending on what I’ve got on hand.
But yeah: following a recipe IS cooking. But if you’re preparing several things from different recipes and can’t make it come out done all at the same time, you’re not yet an accomplished cook.
I do the 3 recipes thing too for something new, in order to get the outlines. It’s amazing how much some standard recipes diverge on essentials (300 degrees for 2 hours vs. 500 degrees for 40 minutes…huh?)
What’s interesting are the recipes that are just…not…right. It’s like someone took a recipe and put it through google translate 3 or 4 times and posted the results. You can tell just by reading it that it really won’t work. So, for those I can get the outline and make it work with my accumulated knowledge.
Agree. If you can’t tell that 3 tablespoons of salt is too much (like I saw in one recipe for shrimp poppers), you’re in for a rude shock. I had a paella cookbook a few years ago written by someone who supposedly is an expert. The only thing it was good for were ingredient lists, as her methods were a sure-fire way to ruin the dish. Bake seafood in the oven for 40 minutes? I don’t think so. And what’s it doing in the oven in the first place? Can’t tell you how much that book annoyed me.
For me personally, the difference between following a recipe and cooking is fire. Lots and lots of fire. Also charred food, smoke, and, in some cases, melted pots and pans. Following a recipe keeps me focused to the point that I don’t wander off and forget what I was doing. Well, not as often anyway.
I think you’re reading too much into the word recipe. Those people are basically telling you they liked your beans and asking how you made them. Did you start from dried beans or use canned? Did you use molasses or maple syrup? How many hours (minimum) do you need to cook it? And so on. Most good cooks can improvise, but presumably you have a basic guideline for what you’re doing. Maybe you’re out of molasses so you use some brown sugar, but presumably you never consider adding clam juice (or pick your own absurd ingredient for baked beans).
For me the difference is technique. Reading “saute” and kind of knowing how to do it (oil and burner on high right?) is very different than actually knowing how to saute something.
Also those little tricks that come from experience. Soak beans in distilled water and not tap water. Brown meat on med to med-high (think 60%) flame for 5 minutes each side then stick in a 350 degree oven (unless scallops). That’s the secret for cooking most proteins. Those are things that just don’t show up in a recipe.
That’s overkill, unless maybe if you have particularly hard water or something. I’ve never used distilled water for, well, pretty much anything and the results have been fine. It also helps to salt the water for soaking (yes, that’s probably the opposite of what most people have learned), and “quick soak” methods work well, too. (And, frankly, you don’t even really need to soak.) ETA: Actually, it looks like the salt trick works for hard water, too.
I love to cook and follow recipes. As with others, once I become familiar I like to branch out, highlighting one spice note over the others for my amusement.
I was a baker years ago and even now like to turn out warm, aromatic loaves, especially in the fall and winter. Here I usually turn for my guide to Bernie Clayton’s Complete Book of Bread. Despite its name it is remarkably quiescent concerning the rotis and chapatis of SE Asia. Also, he has a regrettable tendency to value a bit too highly the opinions of elderly peasant women, particularly those hailing from France.
For my meal preparations, I primarily employ Fannie Farmer Cookbooks and Southern Living magazines that predate the 1960s. This is because
I loathe and fear arugula and since it is in literally everything nowdays, I must be constantly on my guard. (I kid you not, allow me to present arugula ice cream.) Rocket, or Garden Rocket, my ass.
I do wish to corroborate the experience of the chef upthread who only pre-soaks his beans in distilled water. This is of course correct. In fact, I only bathe in distilled water. This is to minimize as much as possible the chance that impurities would come into contact with my flesh.
All in all, fairly easy-going vis-a-vis cooking although bathing is a bit of a hassle.
Ditto. When I want to try something new, I look for a consensus about the important ingredients, what can be added with more of a guess and a prayer and see how it turns out.
Things I cook all the time don’t have a recipe any more - in fact I once wrote out the instructions for a particular dish for someone and said “Cook until it looks done”…and suddenly understood all those old timey recipes that say things like “in a hot oven” or “enough sugar” or what have you.
I’m not a cook at all, but even I will do both. I follow the recipe first (or do what my mom tells me), and then vary it up after a while.
I’m aslo getting good at “punching things up.” For instance, my last rice and beans bowl (kinda like ramen) tasted like it had absolutely no seasoning in it. While it wasn’t perfect, I was able to take the condiments I had and fix it up. (I used this steak rub, some Mrs. Dash. (no salt), a little bit of lemon pepper, through in some ketchup, but that made it too sweet, so I added a packet of green sauce from Taco Bell.) I also figured out exactly what my canned peaches were missing: they needed a little sugar and citrus.
It may not seem like much, but it does surprise me that I’ve picked this stuff up without trying. That’s just not the way my mind generally works.
First time, either recipe or what the person teaching me says.
From then on, it gets my own tweaks. Since I use a wide variety of kitchens and pots in a wide variety of locations, some things will need to get adjusted anyway; spices available will most likely also be different, different sugars, different flours, different… living on the hop while able to cook only in a very specific set of conditions wouldn’t lead to good food.
Oh, and according to the people who grow the best black beans in the world, beans should be soaked and cooked in the water that grew them. Shilling for the local restaurants, of course, but damn those are some good beans…
In my family “knowing how to cook” means knowing how to do a lot of basic things without needing a recipe. Can you make a gravy, stew, muffin, bread, roast, cake, etc, without consulting a book? then you can cook. And you can probably do any variation on those things, so come up with meals for a long time. Do you know how long ot takes to cook rice, and how much water you need? what seasonings mix well, and what don’t? You can cook, and probably come up with a reasonable approximation of anything.
That said, if you had better things to do than learn to cook at your mother’s knew, well, that’s why cookbooks sell so well.
Hey, I came into this thread for the sports results! -1.
I sometimes use recipes for meals I’ve made 100 times, just to see if I’ve forgotten something. I have used recipes for brand new dishes, following to the letter, if they’re complicated or I haven’t made that type of dish before. Get a good recipe from a great chef, follow it to the letter and impress yourself and others.
My parents had a catering business for 20 years and have dozens of recipe books. They read them for pleasure and inspiration, but don’t follow them exactly unless the dish is completely new to them.
I often cook medieval. This means following a style of recipe that would have instructions like “and then make a green sauce, in the usual way” and not have included the fucking sauce recipe anywhere in the manuscript. So I’m used to winging it.
