You have to follow the recipe
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One of the things I found most annoying about watching someone trying to teach someone else how to cook (while at uni) was that the teacher never pointed out when something didn't matter. Whether it was "now you put in 1.5tsp of salt to the sauce" or "now you put in 1.5tsp of yeast to the dough", the method was presented as unyielding. In fact the sauce can be made in infinite variety, while the dough must be made just so. Know when to yield to the expert, and know when not to bother.
Playing a fugue vs playing jazz: For one, you need a carefully-constructed score and you really do have to follow it for all the voices to come out right, and for the other all you need is a fakebook and a good ear.
This is part of the stages of mastery, as well: You go from being a rigid rule-follower to someone with an intuition as you gain experience, but for some things, even the masters are quite rigid.
http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/intro/preservice/stg...
> The third stage is competence, the point at which an individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. [snip] Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the advanced beginner stage.
Cake is different. If you’re lucky, or really know how the chemistry works, messing around with a cake recipe will make a different, yet still edible kind of baked good.
Or it may be that the standard for curry in this example is lower than the standard for bread, perhaps because there is no set expectation for the taste of curry -- maybe one has it much less often and is less familiar with it -- while bread is something one has almost everyday and expectations are higher.
As an Indian, we don't even call any of our dishes 'curry'. They are all specific dishes with very specific tastes. If you're making a Rajma Masala, or a Punjabi kadhi, or a Gujarati kadhi, or a Khadi Dal, or a Shahi Paneer: it's very easy to screw them up and in most cases you wouldn't be able to fix them after one mistake. You might make a good enough something, but it wouldn't be Rajma.
To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't.
As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge.
Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.
Hmm, not for everyone!
I'm a competent cook (self taught, cooking for 20 years or so), and at home cooking western dishes, as well as thise from around the world (Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, all sorts), yet baking is the one thing I seem to find difficult.
Firstly, it seems you have to get your measurements right - there isn't much room for experimentation with quantities, just follow the recipe. Aside from that, my mixture/dough always seems too wet, too sticky, too dry, too whatever it shouldn't be! And I don't seem to have the knack for how to fix it, or an intuition to know when it's "right". Same deal when it makes it to the oven; things often end up over or under baked, because I just don't have the knack of knowing when it's done.
I'm British, so always use grams/millilitres when cooking - TBH, I wouldn't even know what "a cup of flour" was!
If you get the measurements wrong, your end product will be 'wrong' Cooking gives you ways to fix your mistakes.. (add water, cook it more, add spices etc etc)
Not to single you out for an oft repeated phrase, but I've never like this set of comparisons.
Baking surely requires you to precisely follow recipes in a way cooking usually doesn't, but merely following instructions precisely isn't science. Really, there is an art of and a science of both cooking and baking. Understanding some of the science of baking is actually what enables one to productively modify and create recipes.
Measure cal by weight as a proportion of total weight of corn and water (for comparison Paul Bertolli estimates the water weight of meats in "Cooking by Hand" for his brine formulas). I like 0.5% cal and 4x water to corn. This is on the light end (standardized by total weight, recipes vary 0.3% to 1.6% cal) which brings out corn flavor.
Simmer at least an hour, or more, till kernels are nearly al dente, not chalky. For less effort use a slow cooker, and start the clock hours later when it reaches 80 C. Leave overnight before rinsing well. The corn will have nearly doubled in weight. This is nixtamal.
As recommended in “Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico” by Bricia Lopez, grind 4:15 water:nixtamal for 40 minutes in a 1.5 liter Premier Small Wonder Table Top Wet Grinder. Indian cooks, chocolatiers on a budget like this wet grinder. She recommends 450g corn. More will push off the lid, which one can fix by drilling a 1" deep hole with a 2 1/4" Forstner bit in a 5" or so square block of hardwood, to rest just over the lid as a lid stop. Then one can use more corn, which needs less tending. This is a problem like designing the paper feed in a copier, a career I'm grateful I don't have.
If the masa is too wet, work in a bit of masa harina. Test by kneading by hand; it should be just shy of sticky, but not sticky.
I bake harder than some say (I like brown specks and the resulting flavor) on a Baking Steel. I plan to experiment with an actual comal, which might breathe better as my masa is on the edge of too wet, like an artisanal bread dough. It puffs nicely.
If one happens to have a VitaMix or VitaPrep commercial blender, one can get a reasonable approximation of this by blending corn with too much water, then thickening with masa harina. Masienda.com sells a masa harina from their white corn. Be aware that grind fineness is just one axis, and a VitaPrep can actually overdo this. One ends up 2:1 nixtamal:harina by dry weight, 2/3rds of the way there, with an inferior texture but much of the great flavor of different landrace corns. One will then decide a wet grinder is worth it.
Well there is no mythological singular way to cook a cultural dish. Notwithstanding many regional differences, the myriad of recipes out there tend to vary in some way even if it's minimal. e.g. curry, chili
I know the process, a bit. The way I see it is: first you _follow the recipe_ , until you think you understand it and are getting reasonably good results.
Then tweak it and take notes of the resulting improvements or setbacks. Repeat for life. As you say, it's iterative and multi-dimensional.
It's not just cooks and chefs, but all artists. What's the number 1 reason hollywood/publishers/author's guild are vehemently against users modifying their movies/books to better suit their tastes?
"It destroys the artistic intent of the creator. The artist intended it for it to be consumed in a specific way, and by [removing the mushrooms/censoring the swear words/making all the characters zombies/etc.], you've created something the artist did not intend for you to consume"
And my response is: well, obviously! It is the height of arrogance to get offended when someone modifies your (dish/movie/book) to be more to their liking as it implies your original creation was perfect and could not be improved upon!
Most vegan recipes are trash, and in most cases we are only a decade or two into the global development of that recipe.
You really can “fuck around” and find new major advancements in vegan cuisine.
Many problems (pizza) are totally unsolved.
I tend towards improvising but it depends both on the source of the recipe--if it's from something like Cook's Illustrated I can be pretty confident it's been pretty thoroughly tested and compared with alternatives--and how familiar/opinionated I am about the general type of food. As I've gained experience over the years, I definitely have increasingly tended to make changes and not sweat details that don't seem critical. (e.g. this ingredient is close enough or is used in such small quantity that I'll feel free to substitute or omit rather than make a special trip to the store.)
You can either use battle-tested libraries or you can try to understand and reimplement them to suit your use case. The former is safer but the latter is necessary if you want to truly understand and build skills. That said, yea, not when there are deadlines (expecting guests).
Baking, aside from maybe bread or pizza bases or something, is basically pure luxury, whereas cooking is actually useful.
I can probably count the times I've baked in the last few years in the single digits.
If you put too much flour in a cake it's going to ruin the consistency, potentially be too dry, whatever.
If you put "too much" spice or oil or vegetables or whatever in a curry or casserole or soup it's just going to taste different. It's quite hard to make a meal that's not serviceable on the hob.
If you're teaching something, you might as well teach something that tells the student they were wrong, instead of hiding their mistake.
That’s completely different from cooking, which is about learning to Google, evaluating whether to trust a recipe, menu planning, seasonal ingredient management, knowing the personalities of the people you’re cooking for, understanding a wide range of cuisines... it feels like a fully different activity.
And being able to follow the recipe isn’t really the key to either. It’s the price of admission.
But I find google (or ddg in my case) to be shit for finding recipes.
Too many results, lots of filler content about someone’s grandma and yada yada yada.
These days I just pick up a few well rated cookbooks (or I receive them as gifts) and go from there.
Let someone else do the curation, it’s very rarely the fun part of cooking, and I enjoy cookbooks because they have recipes for things I wouldn’t have thought to even look up.
Plus, there’s something very calming to me about looking through a cookbook. Maybe it’s the same for others.
Cooking and baking shows are similar. It’s just hard to be stressed watching someone make food.
For instance, that your baking powder has the same "power" as what the original creator used, or that your flour has the same gluten content.
Ingredients vary by brand, and if you're in a different country, can be quite different (for instance, the majority of cream in Australia has added gelatin).
Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves.
Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too.
Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely.
Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter.
Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.
To use a missile metaphor: Stir-fry is guided, bread is ballistic.
My husband modified a recipe to make it easier to read, but in doing so had also corrected a "mistake". He's not a pastry chef. He changed the butter cream recipe from "until the syrup is at 238 degrees" to "until the syrup is at room temperature". It wasn't too bad, but it was off. I got upset when I realized the modified recipe differed from the original.
This pal hasn't watched "Babbete's Feast".
It takes skill and/or time and effort to discover a recipe in a field like baking, where the desired chemical reactions are fragile and easy to disrupt. The message of the post is: don't try and discover recipes in difficult fields like baking, unless you know what you're doing.
Or unless failure is an option! (And ideally, you're at least writing down what you did.)
Of course trial and error is perfectly fine as long as you are prepared to accept "error" as a potential outcome.
"Follow the recipe" is an awful philosophy. Learn the recipe and then improvise is much better, because it helps you understand the domain much more significantly.
But if you lack the basic ability to follow the rules, you're just a bad cook.