The Improvisational Cook

Read parts one and two.

Once you learn why a recipe works the way it does, you are ready to change it. If you know the roles that the ingredients play in a recipe, you can be confident when you want to make simple substitutions and additions to improve the recipe. Similarly, if you know that the reason a particular dish is braised is because the low cooking temperature slowly breaks down the tough proteins in a particular ingredient, you can experiment with other methods of doing the same thing (such as marinating that ingredient in an acidic solution).

When I change recipes, I tend to think in terms of balancing. Each recipe balances along several different axes:

• flavors (salty vs. sweet vs. bitter vs. sour vs. umami)
• textures (soft vs. tough vs. crispy vs. creamy vs. whatever)
• moisture (wet vs. dry)
• pH level (acidity vs. basicity)
• and others, potentially, depending on the recipe - a soup, for example, might have a particular balance to the size of solid ingredients within it.

When I break a recipe and recreate it, I don't always keep these balances, but I do try to remain aware of them. I might, for instance, want the dish I'm making to be sweeter and creamier than the original dish that I have a recipe for. In such a case, knowing what gave rise to the original balance in flavor and texture would be invaluable.

When I make changes in a recipe, I try to think about how those changes will affect the balances above. Consider a very simple example: a grilled cheese sandwich.

Ingredients:
2 slices white bread
2 slices American cheese
2 Tablespoons butter

Directions:
Put cheese between bread. Heat 1 tablespoon butter on skillet until melted. Place sandwich on melted butter. Cook until cheese begins to melt. Press down on sandwich with spatula. Remove sandwich from skillet. Heat the remainder of the butter until it is melted. Replace sandwich on skillet, untoasted side down, and cook until done.

How might we change this recipe? Maybe I want melted sharp cheddar cheese on pumpernickel with a slice of tomato. Can I use the same directions?

First, I ask myself why the original recipe works and how the changes would affect it:

1. Cheddar will melt more slowly than the American cheese, and will be denser once melted.
2. Pumpernickel will be denser than the white bread, making it less compressible.
3. Pumpernickel might transmit heat differently than the white bread, leading to a different rate of cheese melting
4. The original recipe calls for only cheese slices between the bread. The addition of tomato might reduce the sandwich's structural integrity.
5. Tomato might also affect the rate of cheese melting.

Next, I might consider balance:

• Flavor: A sharp cheese, a sour bread, and tomato will make this sandwich much more acidic/sour than the relatively bland-flavored original that gets most of its flavor from fat. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we might want to up the fat flavor in this if we want it to still taste something like a grilled cheese sandwich.
• Texture: The original is gooey on the inside, but crispy on the outside. The heartier cheese and bread of the altered version will make for a denser sandwich altogether. Again, this isn't necessarily bad, but it should be noted.
• Moisture: A tablespoon of butter is going to have less of an impact on the pumpernickel than it would on the white bread. Also, tomatoes are fairly wet - and the liquid would be inside the sandwich, which seems awkward.

So, how might I adapt this recipe?

Well, I could add some additional butter. That could both even out the flavor a bit and (if I spread some on the inside of the sandwich) help the cheese melt. Additional butter would also help the bread compress. I might consider starting the sandwich off in the oven so that the cheese begins to melt before I even put it into the skillet. I might also consider cooking the tomato first to render out some of the liquid from it. Alternately, I might cook the sandwich in the oven open-faced first, then place a slice of tomato in between the melted cheese slices so that it would remain in place in the skillet. If I didn't have an irrational aversion to microwave ovens, I might even pop the sandwich into one for a bit before it hit the skillet (to soften the bread and pre-melt the cheese).

Lessons in Recipe Breaking

A number of cookbooks are extremely useful when following this method. Though it isn't for beginners, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is unmatched as a tool for figuring out why recipes work the way they do. Shirley Corriher's Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed and BakeWise are more accessible. They are fairly standard books of recipes, but they provide a good bit of explanation of how and why the recipes work the way they do. As a result, they give you hundreds of recipes ready for adaptation, with a lot of the deciphering work already done for you. Sally Scneider's The Improvisational Cook is a walk-through of something very like the entire process that I've detailed. Her book has a number of recipes with variants of each. She doesn't always explain the reasoning behind each of these variants, but if you follow the thought processes detailed here you should have no problem in using her examples to create your own recipe variants. I am, perhaps, most excited by Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking - a brand new book that promises to reveal the basic ratios that govern the balances in foods. I haven't seen it yet, but from what I've read in previews, it sounds like a superb tool for deciphering recipes, figuring out the essential bits of recipes, and understanding how to alter them while retaining their basic structure.