On average, I cook about 5-6 days a week. Most of time, I’m working from memory or am improvising something based on my knowledge of dishes and cooking techniques. There are certain dishes I do (roughly) the same way every time (like chicken paprikash or goulash), and there are other dishes I make slightly different depending on what meat I happen to have around, what vegetables looked good at the market, etc. (stews, stir fries, jambalaya, dishes of that nature.)
Generally, if I spot a recipe that looks good, I will follow that recipe and make any adjustments from there in future iterations of the dish. However, I also will often dig and research ten or twenty recipes for a certain dish and try to synthesize that information into a single recipe for myself. I’m fairly confident in my abilities to figure out how to do this without ruining the recipe.
When I research ethnic recipes, I always always always try to find something that is as close to “authentic” – or true to the style and manner in which it is prepared in its home country – as possible. It is important for me to establish that baseline (and it’s really interesting for me, too. Part of what makes cooking fun is exploring other cultures and how they approach the kitchen.)
Then there are dishes that are precise to excruciating detail. My sausage recipes, which I’ve developed over many attempts, have ingredients listed in something like baker’s percentages by weight. So, it’ll look like: For every 100g meat: 2.5g salt, 2g paprika, etc.
But, the majority of the time for everyday cooking, what I cook depends on what’s already in the fridge and freezer and needs to be used up, or what ingredients are on sale at the store. Then it’s just improvised or I follow a skeleton of a recipe to which I make adjustments depending on what I have around.
Baking and entirely new items I follow a recipe, everything else I am winging it. I want KNOW how to cook something so I don’t always have to do exactly what a recipe says. If I have a fish, a stick of butter and some orange soda in the fridge, I want to be able to make something out of it without having to google. Most of the recipes I have gotten via google have been less than satisfactory anyway.
Joy of Cooking is my bible. For a new item (Chyotes for a recent example) I will look it up, learn about the basic cooking required then go off on my own. None of my family has died of food posioning, so far.
Pretty much like most people. Things I make often are from memory. Things like chili are different every time, so while I have a basic ingredient list in my head, quantities may change or I may use different peppers. For baking, ingredient quantities are important for consistency in results, so I use recipes. For new dishes, I’ll follow the recipe unless I feel it could be improved by increasing, decreasing, or deleting an ingredient or two. I have my own cookbook on Word, which I couldn’t possibly memorize, so use that quite often. Something like a turkey dinner is completely by muscle memory, it seems.
This is one of my peeves, too. Also, it peeves me a bit when a recipe is well-written, and to-style, but the reviewers are expecting or wanting something more “complex.” Like, say, a simple, classic recipe for a lightly cooked tomato & basil sauce. This is a sauce that is supposed to be fresh tasting, with a minimal amount of ingredients to let the tomato and basil flavors come through. I’ll see comments like “bland. I had to add 4 cloves of garlic, 2 teaspoons oregano, 1/2 tsp thyme, and cooked the sauce for two hours.” Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but completely missing the point of the recipe. If you wanted a long-cooked tomato sauce with an abundance of herbs, look up recipes for that style of sauce.
I wing it. It’s really difficult for me to follow a recipe to the exact letter, although I’ll try harder with Cook’s Illustrated recipes on the 1st try, then I feel free to go “Oh, to hell with pointless XYZ additions.” That said, Mr. Horseshoe told me recently that I’ve become a damn good cook, and I’ve gotten really good at seeing ahead of time where a recipe is sub-standard and tweaking for better results: toasting orzo first instead of just boiling it, using broth or stock instead of water, etc.
I follow recipes for more complex or ethnic cooking the first time and if I like it, continue to follow the recipe until committed to memory. If I don’t like it I either tweak the recipe or dismiss it entirely.
My cooking style is pour a beer from the keg, set up my mise and get cooking. I love it and cook at home entirely from scratch about 5-6 times a week.
Open beer
Make fire
Spear meat with long sharp pointy spear
Connect spear to motor
Turn on motor
Drink beer while tending to meat spinning slowly over fire
The majority of the cooking I do is in a rush so that my kid gets some dinner in him before it’s his bedtime. I try and figure it out in the morning so I’m not just in the pantry trying to figure out what I can make with a sprouted onion and some Cocoa Puffs. Best laid plan, though…
When I have the luxury of time I love to find and follow recipes. I’ve been cooking long enough now that I feel as if I can read a recipe and understand whether leaving out one ingredient I don’t care for will change the nature of the dish so I’ll stray from a recipe in that way. (I won’t however, bash it in the online comments)
Wing that sucker! About the only thing I’m reasonably precise on is baking, and even then I’ll play with it as I go, adapting to current conditions.
To the intense annoyance of my friends who brew, I am a “Jedi Brewer.” I brew by feel, not by recipe. Pisses them off no end that my brews always beat theirs in competitions.
I think people who don’t cook a lot would probably be more prone to sticking to recipes, whereas people who cook frequently already have a feel for how much of what ingredient will taste like and what they want. This is a theory I invented based on my personal experience alone.
When I first took a shot at becoming a better cook, I was very much by the book because I had no idea what I was doing. I will now occasionally, when growing bored of the same five things I eat most often, glance at a new recipe for inspiration, but will tweak it according to my tastes on the fly. Otherwise, when going with what I know, I throw things together and they come out fine.
Blackened, and not in the Cajun way. I never really can tell something is done until it actually bursts into flames, so pretty much everything comes out tasting the same.
