Cooking Better with Fewer Instructions – [making food you’re proud of]
They say that practice makes perfect. And since we have to eat everyday, we have a ready-made practice schedule that helps us develop our cooking craft.
For many people, cooking is threatening – a task that is a chore. For other people, cooking is relaxing – a task that is a release.
Is it possible to move out of the chore-based view of cooking and into a perspective of release? I think so.
If you are serious about wanting to cook, or wanting to learn to cook, or wanting to learn to cook better, you will reach that release. At some point you will move from experiencing cooking as an anxiety-inducing event with careful reading of recipes and careful measuring motivated from a fear of failure, to experiencing cooking as a relaxing and mindful event. This state of relaxation comes when you read recipes as a way to enter into the community of cooks and chefs who have performed the same actions on the same types of foods, with the same techniques and measurements to arrive at the same outcomes.
Most people don’t question the use of recipes in learning to cook, they see them as instructions for learning how to master a particular aspect of cooking. I wonder how many people realize that recipes are not merely tools for learning, but also tools for practicing and for developing a practice.
With this practice-based view, you start to see recipes as a record of the successes others have had, recipes now look like an empirical experiment that can be replicated in your lab/kitchen, or in any other kitchen for that matter, by any other scientist/cook. Recipes are studies in what is possible with food, and are benchmarks of the level of achievement that culture has attained using a particular kind of food and a particular set of processes.
Magnus Nilsson the thrilling chef at Fäviken argues for home cooks to accept the role of variables in the execution of a recipe from his cookbook:
“The techniques described very rarely include cooking times or temperatures. The reason for this is that I want you, as a reader of this book, to understand how we do things at Fäviken, and try to cook with the same approach as us, instead of trying to replicate a detailed recipe that won’t come out exactly the same in any case, because we are not the same person, we do not live in the same part of the world and the possibilities and limitations of our respective situations are probably very different in terms of the produce we have available and the kind of kitchens we work in.” [25, Nilsson: 2012]
When people rigorously adhere to the precision of a recipe out of fear that they will ruin a dish they neglect to understand that it might just be simple variables of place, equipment, or supplies that lead to a dish not turning out as they had expected. Approaching recipes with a quasi-religious fervor in hopes of perfect execution is seriously wrong-headed and it is a disservice to both the food you are cooking and the people who are eating that food.
If you are reading this and you feel like I am talking to you, I don’t mean to sound harsh – I just want to help reframe your expectations of what you will and can produce with food. Loosen up, have respect for your practice, be gracious with yourself, enjoy the experience, and learn to love food for what it is and what it becomes. If you love the ideal of food and fetishize the recipe as something more than what it is, you will always be disappointed.
Thomas Keller, one of the chefs I most admire (and author of The French Laundry) has this to say about following recipes:
“I can tell you the mechanics – how to make a custard, for instance. But you won’t have a perfect one if you merely follow my instructions. If you don’t feel it, it’s not a perfect custard, no matter how well you’ve executed the mechanics. On the other hand, if it’s not literally a perfect custard, but you have maintained a great feeling for it, then you have created a recipe perfectly because there was that passion behind what you did.” (3, Keller: 1999)
Following a recipe is not the key to perfection – it seems like it might be some emotion like happiness.
Putting that all aside for a moment, it does seem like people who cook at some point begin to be able to cook without recipes. And for whatever reasons, people who can’t cook, or who have to cook with recipes sometimes resent the fluency of people who can whip something up out of thin air. Addressing this resentment is one of the driving motivations for this blog – I want to help people find freedom in cooking, to find success and happiness in the kitchen so that they find joy and satisfaction at the table.
Frankly, I rarely use recipes – but I write recipes, creating through trial and error, marking down a record of the satisfying feedback of the taste of success, acknowledging the tasteless feedback of failure, always logging my experiments so that I can learn more about the process through the act of description. What I have learned is that my cooking practice depends heavily on perception driven by an aesthetics of expectation. In simpler terms, I have two guidelines for every cooking experience:
1) make something that looks like something that you want to eat
2) make something that tastes good
These two guidelines form a language of taste that I’ll be addressing in future posts, but they are important here because I think they reveal the magician’s tricks – they peel back the shroud of mystery about how people make good food. This might be wrong, but I think most people who cook good food probably realize that there are times when you actually cook better when you follow fewer instructions. These are moments of learning – moments of exploration into a world of cooking without safety nets – it is risky, yes, but rewarding.
In Keller’s restaurant, they adhere to a form of the law of diminishing returns that lines up smoothly with findings from psychological research on attention, appetite, and taste. He says:
“What I want is that initial shock, that jolt, that surprise to be the only thing you experience. So I serve five to ten small courses, each meant to satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. I want you to say, “God, I wish I had just one more bite of that.” And then the next plate comes and the same thing happens, but it’s a different experience, a whole new flavor and feel.” (14, Keller:1999)
Delicious!
Ryan Dewey - Kitchen Cognition 
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