Friday Food for Thought

Friday Food for Thought

TGIF!  On Fridays, I will answer a question on food, cooking, or life in general sent by readers. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a Friday Food for Thought post, just shoot me an email (cturner1103 [at] gmail [dot] com) with Food for Thought in the subject line.

It seems a lot of the chefs on TV and writing popular books are very dismissive of recipe books.  They regularly dismiss cooking out of a cookbook as “sterile” or “unexpressive”.  I was curious on your personal take on recipe books?  Are they useful tools spreading best practices or are they suppressive villains pushing conformity.

-Joe

I think of cook books like I think of math books.  My high school math teacher, Mr. Rick Rigel, always said that  you read a math book with paper and pencil.  Is it possible for anyone to learn from a math book or a cook book? Yes.  Cooking with a recipe is just like learning to work a certain type of math problem.  Following a recipe and using it efficiently is a skill in itself and I do not think it is “cheating” or conforming.  I have a specific method for using recipes--  I highlight the recipes I want to try in green and go over them in pink once I try them.  I make notes in the margins of my cookbooks if I’ve altered the recipe or if I have a different idea to try next time.

The recipe is a base, it’s the math formula…but with practice, you also learn to cook with your gut.  This is an acquired skill; so, if your gut remains silent while following a recipe, it does not mean you can’t cook.   If you have a good recipe base and have hesitations about deviating from that recipe, just stick with it. As you get more comfortable, maybe you can tweak the recipe just a bit. I try to make recipes work for my family, so I often change the type of meat used or add more spice (we like it hot).