Have you known people that could walk into any kitchen, take a look at what foodstuffs were available, and cook up something that worked? I'm not sure how these people arrive at these skills, because I assume there is two approaches to cooking: learning to cook from cookbooks, and following recipes, or learning from someone else, such as Mom, Dad, or a cooking school. The former seems to be a very classical approach, and the other more of an improvisational style. I'm not sure how easy it is to move to freestyle cooking from cookbooks or home-taught family recipes. I figure, after a while, you tend to learn what works, make some generalizations, and you have an idea of portion control. I don't do any measuring when I make chicken curry and rice. The recipes I looked at never had the ingredients I wanted. I just did it. Spices are easy, I guess.. for saute cooking, you just season to taste. I'm sure baking is a whole other ballgame, because, well, some stuff you can't alter. I think maybe there are more things that must be kept basic.14 responses total.
My wife is an excellent "freestyle" cook in all the WASPy cuisine areas she grew up with. She'll open the fridge or the cupboard, do some quick mental calculations, then grab a bunch of stuff and start cooking. When she wants to make a seafood risotto, though, she has to refer to her recipe. But even then, she'll improvise: she'll splash some cognac into the pan, or chop up some shallots. To a much lesser degree, I'm the same way with Italian food. The recipe is useful for the order you do things: at what point do you start sauteeing the garlic, etc. When we compare notes, we agree that the dishes we make freestyle seem, at least to us, too simple and obvious to be called "recipes," even though to an onlooker they might seem quite involved. Also, we agree that a big part of cooking freestyle is faith or courage or whatever. If your instinct tells you to rub olive oil all over the salmon steaks before you throw them on the grill, do it. Then throw them on the grill, then cook them until you think it's time to take them off. Just do it. That can be the hardest part, especially with something you haven't done before.
We never cook with recipes except the first time making something like bread, where the proportions are important as is the timing. I frequently go to friends' houses and cook up whatever seems to need cooking first, into a stir-fry or soup or stew. Fry the onions first and add the greens last, etc. Any bean (presoaked) or grain can be cooked similarly but millet needs more water than rice. I throw in whatever spice looks interesting in stir fries, and sometimes herbs in the stew or soup. (Don't fry oregano).
I do both, except that I almost never follow a recipe "to the letter", I use it more as a guide. I follow recipes more closely for baked goods. Cooking is an art form, baking is a science, therefore I take more exact measurements for baking. If you wonder too much the chemical reaction may not work right.
I often cook "freestyle". My only regular dinner guest often says that he wishes I would use a recipe. He usually says this while he is in the kitchen fixing my latest disaster. He is a good enough cook that he can not only cook without a recipe, he can almost always fix what I have messed up.
resp:3 baking is a science-- interesting, and fitting. Besides using yeast, and getting things to rise or conform to a certain consistency, what else needs to be constant. resp:4 Practice, and following what has worked, is apparently what you need. Follow and take notes on what he does =) I sometimes call family for tips when I cook, even when I'm fairly confident on what I'm doing.
Baking is a science: in fact, it is the baking that uses a combination of acids (lemon juice, buttermilk, baking powder) in a chemically-balanced amount with a base (baking soda, baking powder) to create a specific amount of carbon dioxide to raise a specific amount of flour, fat, bits of fruit, etc that is most likely to go wrong if you don't have the amounts just right. For me, yeast is much more forgiving and flexible.
Yeast baking is more science if you're using a bread machine, where the mixture that you start it up with has to work out right with the (totally brainless) machine's pre-set cycle. Done by (experienced) hand, yeast is pretty forgiving, because you can make all sorts of adjustments as you go.
I'm not a huge cook ... I do a lot more baking than anything else. What I do cook tends to be stuff that's pretty easy to make (think typical College Student diet), so I don't use a lot of recipes when I'm making dinner ... Dessert on the other hand, I follow the recipe pretty well.
I don't cook enough (often, varied) to be able to go by eye. I don't have an educated enough palate to season "to taste", so I tend to follow recipes fairly closely. I like my chili recipe, but someone told me recently, upon seeing the recipe but not tasting the result, that it didn't have enough flavorings for the amount of meat. Ah well. I think it's practice, whether from the book or from the mentor/instructor.
I think it's practice too -- not necessarily with a specific recipe, but with recipes from a specific cuisine or style, so you have a good grasp of what goes together well and how it's done. I also second the comments about baking; it takes a lot more experience to improvise that properly, because you need pretty precise proportions of ingredients for it to work at all. I can easily improvise Chinese, Thai, or Indonesian given the right ingredients, and I can do some Mexican stuff the same way -- enchiladas rojos or verdes, for example, or raw salsas. I can hack a decent Italianesque red sauce.
You know, I have had some really good exeriences improvising while baking lately. I am trying not to eat eggs so mostly I am eliminating eggs from recipes. I have been using some soy yogurt instead and that seems to be working well.
My mother says "anybody who can read can cook". She taught herself from cookbooks and almost never used them after a while, except for new baking things (I agree baking is different; I rarely bake). I did the same and now I rarely use recipes. But I love reading cookbooks and trying out new recipes (once at least, to get a feel for how much the book's been bowdlerized for American palates). I taught myself to cook Chinese by working through the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook and trying out variations when I should have been writing my dissertation. Later on, when my kids were growing up, I did the cooking and got *really* good at making do with what was fresh and cheap. When I feel some serious cooking coming up I often sit down and consult a bunch of recipes, or search the Web to find a bunch, just to establish parameters to vary from. Then I fall into a creative trance and do what feels, smells, and tastes right. I'm a sucker for complicated dishes with multiple strong flavors contrasting and complementing (I also like plaid), like tinga poblana or pescado a la Veracruzana.
That brings up an interesting point: the sort of milage you get out of improvised cooking probably depends on what sort of food you like to cook. I'm a sucker for ingredients that already taste pretty complicated on their own -- olives, or good cheese, or miso, or beer -- so I tend to just dive in and cook without any preparation. My idea of a good recipe is a combination of flavors that I haven't thought of yet, not a new process I have to master or a delicate proportion I have to measure out. I imagine if I were into long elaborate recipes, or chem-lab-stunt foods like ceviche and souffles and fresh bread, I'd do a lot less improvising. Or maybe that's backwards. Maybe I'd have more respect for ceviche if I didn't think improvisation was so much fun.
I'm the product of a mixed kitchen: My mom actually worked as a home economist and test kitchen researcher back in the 50's, so there's a lot of theory behind what I learned. On the other hand, my dad got heavily into cooking back in the 70's, and was likely to mix all sorts of crazy things together on a whim. Generally I find it works best if I do a recipe a few times (or maybe just once) and then start to muck around with it later on.
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