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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

Heavy imho: My girlfriend and I cannot cook together. She‘s more of the freestyle type, while I like to follow the recipe (programmer here). My reasoning is simple: Someday, someone tried the recipe and came up with a good way of achieving what we are trying to achieve. Which doesn‘t mean you should never alter it. But that‘s a task for another time, and shouldn‘t be performed while you are expecting guests. :)

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Also a programmer here but I agree more with your girlfriend's style.

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).

We have a rule: make the recipe exactly like it’s written the first time. After that we can experiment.

I follow this rule when making new food, and when trying new food. I will typically order something from the menu directly when at a new restaurant, but if I come back I'll make changes.

In cooking (to a greater degree than baking), there are certainly people who lean towards improvising and people who follow the recipe.

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.)

How then to explain the huge variations in recipes? Most recipes (there are exceptions like baking) are simply a suggestion to me and I improve upon them to great result. Although I will admit I am naturally gifted at it, and also have loads of experience. If a soup tastes bland and needs more salt, I am going to make the soup taste good and not worry about respecting the recipe.

When I want to make a dish I'm unsure of, I will usually read a handful of recipes to get the idea, and then just cook it how I'd like. It helps to have a base of knowledge and experience to understand what each ingredient and cooking technique will do to the dish. So instead of having to go line by line through a particular recipe, you understand how the dish is supposed to work and can execute how you are comfortable executing. It likely won't turn out how any of the recipe creators intended, but it'll usually turn out recognizable as the dish in question, with your own touch to it.

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