How do you tell if a recipe ingredient is "important"?

Cafe Society
1

I mean, obviously, for example, you generally can’t have “real” beef stroganoff without noodles of some kind, but in general, suppose you hated some common ingredient usually used as a flavor enhancer rather than a foundation, like onion, or bell peppers, or it called for fresh herbs that are too expensive to get for just one recipe. If it calls for wine, and I don’t drink and thus don’t want to go out and buy a bottle, what if I used water or broth or something?

How do you tell if not using it will substantially change or ruin the culinary experience the dish offers?

2

You make it, you eat it and you learn. A basic way to get started is the substitution/removal of ingredients you can’t or don’t want to eat. Leave/swap 'em out and see what happens.

You can also compare lots of recipes of the same dish to see if a particular ingredient shows up in all of them.

3

You can estimate what can successfully be removed/replaced by what the ingredient is bringing to the dish in question.

Certain ingredients are included not just for their flavour - if you removed bacon from a recipe for instance, you might want to add some extra oil to replace the bacon fat. And some ingredients are so functional as to be nigh on irreplaceable - yeast in baking would have to be replaced by some baking powder alternative.

But other than that, few ingredients are absolute deal-breakers by their absence - it’s just a matter of how much you can remove before you end up with nothing but a thin, tasteless gruel.

4

It’s part of the art of cooking. Experience helps you decide when a deletion, substitution, or addition is likely to work.

5

Looking up multiple versions of a recipe can help as it shows what ingredients they all share vs ones which differ wildly. You need to take it with a grain of salt though because recipe quality on the internet varies wildly. Cooks Illustrated is a valuable resource in this regard because they do all the hard work for you. Before each recipe, they’re an entire written section about the various recipes they gathered and the general quality of each one before they talk through the variations they tried and how much of an impact it had on the end product. Once you’ve read through a bunch of them, you start to get a more general sense and can apply the same reasoning to totally novel recipes.

6

The question is - do you want a good culinary experience, or an authentic one? Substitutions are perfectly fine for the former, but hit-and-miss with the latter.

For instance, if I substitute water for wine, or TVP for chicken, it’s definitely not coq au vin anymore. But if I leave out the mushrooms? Sure, I’d still call it coq au vin.

Another example: I know, from experience, that I can use ostrich as a substitute for venison in Medieval recipes. The taste and texture are the same. So I have no problem thinking of a “venison” dish made with ostrich as authentic, when I make it with the same seasonings and process as I would for venison.

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This. Before I make something new, I’ll look up 6, 7, 10 different version of the recipe online and create a kind of mental heat map for the ingredients and processes.

You can look up more general substitution rules. There are lots of them on the internet.

You can also try looking up “healthy” or “low fat” versions of recipes, because those are very concerned with maintaining something as close to the right flavor as possible.

As for the wine: you can buy little six-packs of tiny wine bottles - something that you may want to keep on hand if you’re making dishes that call for a cup here or there. Otherwise, you can substitute other things for wine. There are plenty of people out there who refuse to cook with alcohol but still want to cook. Depending on what the wine is doing in the recipe, you can use various juices (for deglazing) or broths (for depth of flavor) and get good results.

8

It’s funny, when I read your thread title, the first thing that sprang to mind was ‘flavour’ - for me, it’s frequently the flavour which makes a difference to a dish (as opposed to, say, switching black beans for red kidney beans in a chilli).

If a recipe includes something I don’t have, or like, then I tend to google for an alternative (ie ‘what herb is a good substitute for basil’). Simple excluding spices or herbs often just leads to blander food, IME.

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I find this site useful for general info about substitutions:

10

If you’re making coq au vin, and you don’t use wine (I’d probably substitute vinegar before trying water or broth), then it’s certainly not coq au vin, but it might still be a perfectly good dish.

On the other hand, if you’re making bread and omit the yeast, you’re probably not going to get anything edible at all.

And then there are ingredients which are important but not essential. Most dishes that contain egg, for instance, you can substitute a little oil, but the texture is going to be completely different, and it’s likely to not hold together.

11

I was going to say, the only answer I have is experience. If you’ve done enough cooking
in a thoughtful way (not just robotically following recipes, but learning about what you’re doing, using your sense and senses, etc.), you generally know the role of each ingredient in a recipe and what is necessary, what is not, what can be substituted, etc.

12

These are the two types of ways I consider ingredients to be most important. So in the OP’s example noodles aren’t important, but beef definitely is. (And I’ve had stroganoff on rice before, I really like it on noodles, but I’m not making stroganoff for the noodles). If it’s in the name it’s important in the dish, but without it you could be just making some other kind of dish.

Now there are important ingredients for the flavor, using stroganoff again, mushrooms, onions, and black pepper are crucial for me, but anyone’s taste may differ and you could omit one or substitute and still get some form of beef strogranoff.

And you need to use yeast or some kind of rising method for anything generally considered bread. You can make crackers, matzoh, even some kind of pancakes without yeast, or baking powder, but not bread as it’s generally considered.

Whether a flavor ingredient is important, or something that controls the consistency is important, that’s up to the individual, and as mentioned several times already, experience tells you which way to go.

13

I tried making a strawberry pie once and realized I didn’t have any strawberries. But I went ahead and made it anyway.

And that’s how I invented the pita.

14

I can only choose one? Then it’s the former. Why in the world would I want authentic if it wasn’t good?

15

In addition to experience and consulting multiple recipes, you can learn by reading. I recommend any or all of these four books to help anyone understand the art and science of cooking well enough to feel confident in the kitchen:

  1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee

  2. Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food by Jeff Potter

  3. Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed by Shirley Corriher

  4. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Cooking by Samin Nosrat

16

Also, it may be important to note that cooking and baking can be two very different beasts, in this regard. (Posts upthread about bread are referencing this.)

Baking often involves chemical reactions (particularly the use of baking power / baking soda), and I’ve heard it said that “baking is chemistry”. Fiddling with the ingredients or proportions, or removing something entirely, may disrupt the chemistry required to get the recipe to turn out as expected.

17

I remember way back in the mists of history in Middle School when everyone had to “enrichment” which was shop, art, and home ec.

Anyway, one of the things we did in home ec was that the class was divided into groups, and we all made a simple cake, but each group left out one ingredient from the recipe.

So one cake was made without sugar. Another without butter. Another without eggs. Another without baking soda. Another without salt. Another without vanilla. Another without milk. And another without flour.

Then we all took a look at the finished products. So now you learn that a yellow cake without vanilla is fine. One without salt is fine. One without baking powder is a bit dense but fine. Even leaving out the egg results in a cake. But leave out sugar, and you have something that is not cake. Leave out the butter and, well, it’s something else. Leave out the milk and you’ve got more like a cookie. Leave out the flour, and it’s not even a thing.

So now you know the important ingredients of yellow cake. If you wanted to make yellow cake but didn’t have sugar, you could substitute some other sweetener, like corn syrup. But that syrup would have water, which means you’d have to lessen the amount of milk added. You could add another liquid instead of milk, like juice. You could add almond flour instead of wheat flour. You could leave out salt entirely. You could leave out the baking powder…but you could make the cake fluffy anyway if you whipped the egg whites into foam. If you leave out the egg yolks you can make angel food cake this way instead of yellow cake. Add another flavor instead of vanilla and you’ve got an X flavored cake. Use oil instead of butter. Make a cake without butter and it’s still cake, just dry and lean instead of rich.

And so on and so on. For every ingredient in a cake there’s something it brings to the cake. Salt and vanilla just enhance flavors, add other flavors if you want. Sugar adds sweetness, substitute another source of sweetener. Flour creates the structure, substitute another structure. You could substitute literally every ingredient in classic yellow cake recipe and get something that could plausibly be called “cake”, even though it wouldn’t be a classic yellow cake anymore. Or you could just leave things out and get something edible and maybe even good, but it’s not plausibly a cake anymore. Or you could leave stuff out and get an inedible mess.

In each case, you’re just evaluating the reason for each ingredient, and deciding if that reason is important or not, and what you would need to substitute for that ingredient to bring that element back into the dish. So things like bacon add fat, salt, smokiness and savory brown-ness. Want to leave out the bacon, just find another way to add those flavors back in, or live without them. Substitute oil and salts are easy to add, the savory brown-ness is a bit harder.

18

Another good one is Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman

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Baking is Science for Hungry People

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If it’s in the title.