Reading this thread, it occurs to me that I am simultaneously more and less skilled as a cook than my sister “J.” That is, we’re about equal in technique and presentation.
I am more efficient than J is. When I go grocery shopping each week, it’s largely with the next week’s dinners in mind; on Saturday morning I decide what the next seven meals will be (though not in what sequence they’ll be made), and I make sure we have the ingredients required in the larder when we go shopping (along with a good number of staples, of course). And of course my first step in making supper each night is to pick one of the planned meals, then get all the ingredients out. It seems so elementary a step to me that I was gobsmacked when I realized she didn’t do it that way. I get through any given meal prep more quickly than she.
But she’s more creative than I am. She experiments; she innovates. Sometimes she crashes & burns, but more often than not her new creations are better than any new creation than mine.
On your scale… I’m a 3.25, maybe a 3.5 on a good day.
Thing is, while it’s very hard to become a great chef, it’s pretty easy to become a decent cook. Just buy quality ingredients and follow the instructions, and the results are usually as tasty as if you were a pro.
I don’t see why you need to memoize recipies to be considered a good cook. I guess that makes me a 3. But I have no problem checking out the fridge and freezer and just whiping something totaly new up. It will usually be quite good.
My wife often complains that, when she likes a new dish, she can never request it again and get it exactly as it was the first time.
The kitchen I ran was in a 24-hour diner. The skillsets are still very different, but I’m not sure I’d call what we put out “high quality.” It wasn’t bad, but certainly it wasn’t fine dining.
Yeah, I guess that “high quality” isn’t really the right word - I mean just getting out a consistent and edible product in a restaurant setting is a really different thing than a home cook. At home, you don’t have to manage staff, you don’t have to worry about consistency (nobody cares if the pork chops you made tonight are the same as the ones you made last week, as long as they’re both good), you don’t have to worry about tons of food prep or food safety and about a gazillion other things that I probably don’t know about.
If cooking in a restaurant was just a more-busy version of cooking at home, where I could just screw around all day and end up with a meal that people ate, I’d open a restaurant in a second. But I know too well that it’s not, so I’ll just stay cooking for Mr. Athena and I.
Hell, it’s even hard to get food on the table for 6 or 8 people if I also want to socialize as well. You pretty much have to serve things that are 90% prepped and done before people show up, or you stay in the kitchen and cook while everyone else has a good time.
I’m a 5. The wife’s a 6.5. But she can’t bake worth squat, while I can bake just about anything, made from scratch and if necessary on the fly. I’m also the family brewer. But I will defer to her decisions in the kitchen every time.
I think you can be at different levels with different skills (many of which are intertwined). These include:
Familiarity with ingredients: Ability to recognize raw ingredients ranging from the mundane to the exotic, recognize quality, understand their various properties, identify appropriate preparations, correctly store and preserve, conceptualize what ingredients will harmonize with them, and know what dishes use them.
Technique: This covers skill with basic cooking techniques, such as cutting, all the way to advanced preparations. Also included is the ability to source the correct ingredients. . A better cook will have consistently high mastery of a wider range of more advanced techniques.
Flavor: This refers to understanding how ingredients work together to create flavors. A better chef will be able to use ingredients, herbs, spices and technique to create food fitting a wide variety of flavor profiles. This should range from bold to subtle, across regional cuisines, and have some internal variation (e.g. all your Indian dishes shouldn’t taste exactly the same). Cooks with strong flavor skills can consistently and accurately achieve a wide range of flavors…
Timing and kitchen organization: A better cook will be able to mentally organize the preparation of multiple dishes, using their space and time efficiently. They can break complex preparations into discrete steps, and work on different dishes in different stages while holding to an appropriate timeline for that meal’s preparation. Better cook organize their equipment and ingredients so that the kitchen does not get in the way of their cooking, and they will be able to manage anyone helping out in the kitchen, directing them to appropriate tasks at the appropriate times.
Fluency and innovation: Fluency refers to how easily your cooking skills come. A fluent cook can cook a wide range of dishes from memory, and can instinctively understand how to modify dishes and make substitutions. A fluent cook’s cooking is built on understanding technique and ingredient rather than on distinct recipes, allowing them to freely improvise with consistently good results A very fluent cook can become an innovator, and create entire enjoyable and novel dishes, fusions, and combinations.
Knowledge: This covers a wide range, including a scientific grounding in how cooking changes food, the basic philosophy of different cuisines, an understanding of the role in food in society, the psychology of good eating, nutrition and health, the history of various cuisines and dishes, etc.This knowledge is not minutiae, but rather a deep understanding of we eat what we eat.t. A better cook ties her work into the richness of all the history, culture and science of food.
Context: Finally, context covers everything else about how food is served. A better cook will put his food in the context of the time, place, and people she is serving. . A better cook can choose a menu that harmonizes together and feels coherent, while still providing satisfying variety.
I am, I’d say, a very good cook but not a spectacular one. I am quite fluent and have very good timing and organization skills. My knowledge of technique and ingredient are high for a home chef, but have some gaping holes (I can’t bake, for example, to save my life), and don’t include much really advanced stuff. I consistently create good flavors, but I tend to default to a handful of (very good) flavor profiles. My food is good, but the flavors are “clumsy” and kind of go for the easy shots rather than the more subtle ones.
I am surprised at the people who can’t bake! I always figured baking was the easier of the two. I mean, I can bake, and if I can bake, anyone can bake. I like baking because it’s so precise. None of this “cook until done” shit you see in recipe books.
I would rate myself at a 5, I think, though saying that I create new recipes is not precisely correct. I concoct new dishes, but they don’t have recipes as such, and I don’t often use recipes (except as rough guidelines) for existing dishes. I do pretty much everything on the fly, mostly by scent. It drives recipe-following types crazy when they join me in the kitchen–but then, they also look at me funny for anthropomorphizing roux, so what do they know? They certainly enjoy the finished products well enough.
Many failures in baking are due to impatience, unwillingness to follow the recipe, or – oddly – unwillingness to adjust the recipe to conditions.
The mother of the young cousin I spoke of in the OP, for instance, considers me a great cook because of my cookies, brownies, and such almost always come out well, while hers always end up slightly burned. This I think is because she doesn’t like monitoring the process, or accepting that the time listed in the cookbook is a guideline, not an absolute, since different ovens cook differently. In her case, it’s a matter of personality.
“Memorize recipes” isn’t how I’d put it. To me, a good cook does not remember that the recipe calls for 3/4 cup of whatever; she just throws some in, no measuring, and knows by sight and feel whether it’s enough. Or maybe that’s a higher order of expertise.
I think the OP puts way too much emphasis on ‘recipe invention’ and ‘originality’–or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what Skald means. The most experimental cooks IME have little overlap with those of the best “hand.”
5 here. Dad did practically all the cooking because Mom never really learned how (she was banned from the kitchen when growing up) and much of what I cook is something picked up from Dad. I’m also an experimenter, creating varaiations of known recipes; very useful when making barbecue sauce.
Tomorrow’s dinner will be my seafood & pasta salad, which is a variant of the macaroni, smoked herring, butter, and parmasean cheese dish that Mom created.
Yeah, that’s exactly it. My SO tells me to start the potatoes. He says, “Put them in oil, just enough so they are thoroughly covered.” Uh…what? Does that mean a cup of oil (clearly too much) or a spoonful of oil (clearly not enough) or what? How thoroughly covered? Do I roll them in it? Do I dip them in it? WHAT DO I DO??? He of course would know, and invariably, the answer I come up with is the wrong one.
This disconnect has always been in our house. I just don’t get it, and probably never will.
I think that is a problem of terminology (you haven’t been properly taught what “thoroughly covered” means in terms of your senses) and a failure of your SO to communicate clearly.
Cookbooks–and some cooking teachers who haven’t thought the matter through–generally assume that the person receiving the information has a certain store of information.
And one can be a great chef without being a great, good, or even adequate cooking teacher.
I’m a 4. I’m high in skill from having worked in a high-end catering kitchen for many years, and pretty high in knowledge being a disciple of Alton Brown. But I’m about a 1 on the creativity scale and a 1 on a “likes to try new things” scale.
I don’t see how memorizing recipes makes you a better or worse cook, though. I am not going to file the recipe for my very-sought-after mac & cheese (not my own creation) in my brain if I can have it printed out in front of me.
I also tend not to make the same thing more than once or twice, So no need to memorize it. Probably because I’m single and have to eat all of what I make. I just made this meatloaf recipe 2 weeks in a row, yielding 9 servings of meatloaf. It was amazing for the first 5 servings, but now I am done with this meatloaf for about a year.
Somewhere between these two, as I create new recipes regularly but not in any way systematically. I read cookbooks like novels, for ideas, and only re-consult for tricky stuff, like candy temps and quickbread leavening. I mostly cook like people’s grandmas do, without precise measuring and without an ingredient list.
My poor husband was never trained to do anything besides VERY CAREFULLY following a recipe, and so he has no self-confidence to invent recipes. He can make:
waffles, using the Joy of Cooking,
tomato sauce, using an old family cookbook,
chocolate fudge, using Grandma Nettie’s index card, and
ribs in the oven, using 4 pages of notes that he took while watching Alton Brown make them on TV.
I once went away for a week and he either ate fast food or just didn’t eat (for 48 hours!)
I am a 2 point something: I don’t have anything memorized, but I can follow a recipe okay. And this business of “creating new recipes” is crazy talk, in my opinion. Seriously, that’s a sign of a seriously advanced cook as far as I’m concerned.
My excuses are that I live alone, so I don’t have to feed anyone but me, so I would spend so much more money and time making dishes for just me, when I just want to eat something and go back to what I was doing. Also I have no space in my tiny apartment kitchen: I have a small rectangle of counter space in front of the microwave and that’s it. It is the staging area for the frozen dinners and microwavable cups of mac ‘n’ cheese and soup and the sandwiches that are my lot in life.
I did make bread from scratch twice when I was in high school, and it was INCREDIBLE! I’m still proud of that, but I’ll probably never do it again.
I’m not sure I agree with the rankings and the descriptions. I’m a 6, but I don’t have a lot of complex recipes memorized, which is your “4.” I do a lot of things by feel, and I improvise all the time. The basics of cooking aren’t too difficult if you like doing it. But I would have to consult a cookbook to check the ratios of ingredients for things I don’t make often, like cakes. Then again, I can bake a decent loaf of bread without weighing a single ingredient, too. Same with pasta and flatbreads. Measuring throws me off for those, I just go by my senses.
Also, when I ask others for recipes, I don’t ask for measurements. I just need to know the ingredients and any tips or general guidelines. The rest I can figure out myself.
I don’t think “memorizing recipes” is important, but I do think that that a certain amount of memorization when it comes to techniques and ratios is invaluable. If you know that a roux is generally 1:1 flour to fat, and that 1T of roux thickens 1 cup of liquid to a light sauce consistency, you have the makings of a lot of stuff - chowder, filling for crepes, macaroni and cheese, etc. etc. You can adjust the amount of roux to make a stew or a sauce or wallpaper paste; you can add things like cheese to thicken in a different way, and on & on. You know how the ingredients work together, and from there, you can make any number of dishes by variations in ingredients and ratios.
Same thing for a lot of different things. If you memorize the basics, then when you’re called upon to make something you’ve never done before, it’s not that hard. You can make a pizza crust from scratch if you know the right combos of water/yeast/flour/salt. You can add any vegetable to a stir fry if you realize that the carrots need to be added before the pea pods if you want them both done at the same time. You can make 5 gallons of beef stock if the only stock you’ve ever made is 2 quarts of chicken stock if you know that the ratio of bones to meat to water to veggies is about the same. You can make any flavor meatloaf you want if you know that you need 3 pounds of meat, an egg, 6-8oz of bread or croutons or breadcrumbs, 1.5 t. salt, and you know it’s done when it reaches 150-160 degrees. And from there, you can probably figure out how to take that meatloaf recipe and turn it into meatballs instead.
It’s those little memorizations that I think are really important, not that you’ve memorized an exact recipe.