Here at MadZak my goal is to deliver you a preview of what you could make with no spins or fancy card tricks, it’s just straight up cooking. With this goal in mind, I find myself giving recipes a new outlook on life. A lot of my ideas for items come from you and from something that looked good some place I visited. I’ve seen that in my off-show cooking, I tend to just combine things and adjust with taste. This mindset is not as hard as one would think, and this view could easily be shifted by just looking a little deeper into our cooking sources.
We surround ourselves with cookbooks and recipes constantly. You find them in newspapers, magazines, this site, and every other place you could think of. Over the years, I think recipes have shifted slightly out of their original focus and have become the defacto cooking standard. Don’t get me wrong here, I love recipes and I feel they are very important to cooking, I just don’t think they should be the standard. Recipes are nothing more than an idea and a journal of success.
My biggest gripe of recipes is that when you follow them, the result is not always positive. If it doesn’t turn out as well as you would have liked you are upset and will probably not try it again. This is where they have shifted. Looking at this situation from an idea mindset versus a instructional one, failure isn’t as well defined. You can also get another positive feeling out of it which maybe the sense of solving a problem, challenging yourself, or being creative.
I feel most of the authors of recipes are folks who took the later approach. They have most probably finely tuned and tweaked the recipe over and over again until they found a forumla that works. This forumla is a great baseline, but it’s only a measure of success for that person. You have different equipment, atmosphere, and quality ingredients than the original author which greatly destroys that sound forumla.
Cooking is an art, but it’s a very tangible, tasty, and simple art to play with. My challenge to you is next time you view a recipe, take the idea and the combination of things and play with it. Chances are you, and your loved ones, will find that eating just got much better!
October 16th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I follow what you are saying … I would like to add that as ones comfort level with cooking improves, ones propensity to go off script so to say increases. I can look at a recipe and on the first try, tweak the ingredients to my preference. The recipe calls for one clover of garlic … oh no, I'm adding two or maybe three if they are small. But then, I've been cooking for 20 years (geez I'm old).
One disadvantage, if one tweaks enough and turns out a great meal, the ability to duplicate the tweaks next time (unless one takes copious notes) and produce the same flavor combos is a bit unlikely. But then, that is the fun of cooking!
October 16th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Point well taken, I could be at that moment in life where the instructions seem less fun than the experimenting. I do, however, think that people should experiment from the get go. I think the whole comparing to commercials and professional pictures is what's halting that experimenting.
I hear you on the disadvantage to tweaks, happens to me all the time but in my mind, that's the art aspect, no dish is always the same