Recipe Use

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.

Read part one.

How do you use a recipe? Most people, I think, gather the ingredients listed and follow the directions. That makes sense. It isn't what I do.

Instead, I read the recipe. I try to figure out why it works, what is happening, and what each of the ingredients and steps contributes to the final result. I model the process in my head, imagining each step. I try to imagine what the dish would taste like as it is being made, tracking the evolving changes in flavor and texture.
Original images by Melissa Wiese and Wayne Truong
As I become better at this process, I gain a greater understanding of what happens when I cook. I'm learning, and recipes are my textbooks. When I understand how and why things work the way they do, I can learn to replicate them without a recipe and use them in other contexts. The more often I see something work, the more I internalize it. Complicated processes become second nature.

I learn how ingredients interact, not only flavors and textures that work well together, but also chemical reactions that ingredients undergo when combined or heated in different ways. I learn when and how eggs act like a leavening agent and when they make things denser. I learn why sauces separate and what makes that less likely. I learn how both fat content and heat can have an effect on the tenderness of meat.

I learn how to cook.

That's what recipes are for.

Read part three.

I love reading cookbooks, but I rarely follow recipes exactly. I treat recipes as learning tools and think that - most of the time - exactly following a recipe is a mistake.

When someone creates a recipe, they are creating it from a particular point of view with a particular set of tools. Ovens and stovetop ranges all have their peculiarities. The oven in the house I grew up in had some issues, including a definite hot-spot. Baking in it would be a very different experience than baking in a high-end oven with incredible temperature control, much less one of those newfangled hybrid radiant/convection ovens. Even a medium heat on a high-end Viking gas range is going to be different than the medium heat on a forty year old electric burner.

The recipe author and I are unlikely to be using identical ingredients. Fresh foods not only have a different taste, but (due to things as simple as moisture content) they can cook differently than foods that have been stored. The source of your food matters - what sort of soil were your vegetables grown in? It will make a difference. Spices and dried herbs lose flavor with age. How fresh are the ingredients being used by the recipe author? Are they fresher than yours? Not as fresh? Even among ingredients of similar freshness, there are going to be significant differences. Not all tomatoes are created equally. Even processed ingredients can vary. Different brands of butter might have different salt content. Even the same brand in another country will often have a different formula.

The other thing to keep in mind is that people have varying preferences. Even if you had the recipe exactly as prepared by the author, it might not be designed to suit your tastes. While you select recipes based upon what sounds good to you, chances are good that the recipe author didn't have you in mind when they created the recipe. So, while the general flavor profile of a dish might be appealing to you, there's a decent chance that it can be tweaked so that you'll like it even more.

I treat recipes as frameworks. A recipe, to me, is a set of guidelines for creating a dish. I might change very little, or I might substitute something in for nearly every ingredients.

In this series of posts, I'm going to discuss how I use recipes, how I learn from them, and how I break them up into little pieces and put them back together again.

Read part two and three.

If you cook from recipes, this Recipe Divider Magnetcould be incredibly useful. How many times have you needed to feed three people when you had a recipe for eight servings (or vice-versa)? Say your original recipe (for 8) calls for 1/3 of a cup of something. This thing will tell you that you need 2 tablespoons (for 3). As a refrigerator magnet, it will be there when you need it.