STIRRING THE POT
There are a whole lot of recipes out there, but do you really need them to cook?
Recipes are procedural, time consuming and hardly an iron clad guarantee of success. But how do you really use one? Are measurements set in stone, or can you just eyeball them? What about substitutions – some, all or none? How free are you to adapt?
Let's break it down.
How closely do you need to follow a recipe?
First and foremost, it's entirely up to you. But it also has a fair bit to do with the recipe itself and even the person who wrote it.
Going rogue with anything in baking is fraught with danger. Change a liquid quantity or a sugar amount and the chemistry of your cake or bake will be all out of whack.
For savoury dishes you can generally take a freer hand. Seasonings like salt and sugar can be adapted to your tastes without changing the overall chemistry of the dish.
If they're cooked on the stove, I think liquid quantities should always be adapted. The rate of evaporation won't be the same on every stove and with every pot, so you need to use your intuition of how far to reduce something or how much liquid to add in the first place.
Are all recipes written the same?
Recipes are technical writing and will follow some basic principles of structure and timing, but recipe writers differ hugely in their approach to the craft.
I once had a discussion with Yotam Ottolenghi on this. He and his test kitchen write recipes to a high degree of specificity from times to temperatures to millimetre measurements of pans. The idea is to eliminate as many variables as possible.
I'd liken his approach to a sniper rifle; finely calibrated to hit the bullseye.
My own approach is more like a shotgun. Even if you're off the mark by a fair bit you should still be able to hit the target. I write this way because I think cooking has too many variables to be effectively eliminated.
Manual ovens can be out by 20 degrees from electric ones. The heat from gas, electric and induction stoves is very different, and the material, size and shape of pans will change timings again.
And yet you never see a recipe that specifies one approach for an aluminium pan on gas, and another for a cast-iron pan on induction, even though the quantities and timing will be very different from one to the other.
My advice is to find a cook whose recipes usually work for you, and stick with them. It's probably that their style of writing fits well with your style of cooking.
Should you use measuring cups or loosen up? Photo: iStock
I don't have measuring spoons or cups. Can I just eyeball things?
You should buy measuring spoons and cups. And while you're at it, a set of scales would be a good investment. And chuck a couple of thermometers in your basket, too.
In general we are very bad at eyeballing measurements. Kitchen measures aren't the kind of things we come across every day. An average cutlery teaspoon has a capacity of around 2.5ml, about half the volume of a measuring teaspoon, which is 5ml.
You could buy all the things I mentioned above for less than the price of one cookbook, and if you don't have them, then the money you spend on cookbooks is going to be pretty ineffective.
When can I substitute ingredients I don't like or don't have?
You don't have to put anything into your cooking you don't want to eat. You're the one eating it. But it does pay to understand why an ingredient is used.
Wine, for example, is usually added to dishes to provide savouriness, not to make things taste grape-y, so if you're not using wine, the best substitute would be stock, not grape juice.
My rule is that if an ingredient is relevant to a taste – salt, sweet, sour, bitter or umami – you'll need to find a substitute. Fish sauce is used for its saltiness and umami, so substitute something else salty and umami such as soy sauce, a stock cube, nutritional yeast, miso or Vegemite.
If you want to swap out white sugar for brown sugar, honey for rice malt, of course you can. There will be a bit of flavour difference but all of those ingredients are sweet, so they're doing the same job.
If something mainly affects smell instead of taste – herbs, spices etc. – you can leave them out or substitute or add extra if you want to. The recipe will still "work", it might just have a slightly different flavour.
Is it better to cook intuitively?
Well, yes and no. Cooking is a learned skill. Nobody is born knowing how to do it, and there's no physical prowess or particular mental acuity that makes you good at it. Good cooks aren't all geniuses, nor do they all have exceptional whisk speed or knife dexterity.
Good cooks are excellent learners. What we call intuition is something learned over a lifetime of observation and experience, if not specific study.
My wife mentioned to me recently that the one thing that has made her better at stir-frying wasn't me teaching her, or even her watching me do it. It was simply eating the food that I made.
Knowing how something should or could taste, or should or could look, fed her intuition of how to cut something, how long to keep something in a pan, how something should be seasoned, how wet or dry a dish should look, and how those visual cues translate to taste.
The best way to cook more intuitively is to eat well. And I think that's something we can all get behind.
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Adam Liaw on how to trust your cooking instincts (and rely less on the recipe) - Good Food
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