The cooking thread

Squidfayce

Eats Squid
i see a lot of you guys use books and recipes etc.

Dont be afraid to experiment.

All cooking is is a bunch of set order of operations where the variables (ingredients) can be substituted, in most cases entirely. This is not true of baking though. follow baking recipes. That shit is science.

If you've successfully cooked a stir-fry, soup, casserole, etc. from a book, you can make all of these things and you don't need another book or another recipe to follow. Just do what you did before, but with different ingredients. Trust yourself.

Where i find books and recipes useful is for flavor combos I may not have thought of before. Eg a Vegan raw broccoli, cranberry, smoked almond salad with a cashew dressing i saw online became steamed Broccoli with a burnt butter an smoked almond sauce with a couple dry cranberries for garnish. (the raw broccoli salad was amaze too btw).

Where else i think books initially come in handy is for regional cooking where the ingredients and rules are alien - eg Szechuan or thai etc. But once you get their stuff down over a few different things, it becomes clear how you can experiment without the recipes. E.g. Thai salads - just need to understand the salty/sweet/sour/hot combo ( eg fish sauce/palm sugar/lime juice/chilli) and you can swap all of those ingredients out for a completely different sauce following the same principles - Eg Soy sauce/ketjap manis/ lime/ginger and garlic becomes an Indonesian dressing for BBQ chicken salad or Soy/mirin/rice wine vinegar/wasabi becomes a jap dressing for a cold noodle salad etc. - adjust to your liking or add different additional ingredients while balancing these tastes.

Just have fun with what you know and have learned already. Trust yourselves.
 

beeb

Dr. Beebenson, PhD HA, ST, Offset (hons)
i see a lot of you guys use books and recipes etc.

Dont be afraid to experiment.

All cooking is is a bunch of set order of operations where the variables (ingredients) can be substituted, in most cases entirely. This is not true of baking though. follow baking recipes. That shit is science.

If you've successfully cooked a stir-fry, soup, casserole, etc. from a book, you can make all of these things and you don't need another book or another recipe to follow. Just do what you did before, but with different ingredients. Trust yourself.

Where i find books and recipes useful is for flavor combos I may not have thought of before. Eg a Vegan raw broccoli, cranberry, smoked almond salad with a cashew dressing i saw online became steamed Broccoli with a burnt butter an smoked almond sauce with a couple dry cranberries for garnish. (the raw broccoli salad was amaze too btw).

Where else i think books initially come in handy is for regional cooking where the ingredients and rules are alien - eg Szechuan or thai etc. But once you get their stuff down over a few different things, it becomes clear how you can experiment without the recipes. E.g. Thai salads - just need to understand the salty/sweet/sour/hot combo ( eg fish sauce/palm sugar/lime juice/chilli) and you can swap all of those ingredients out for a completely different sauce following the same principles - Eg Soy sauce/ketjap manis/ lime/ginger and garlic becomes an Indonesian dressing for BBQ chicken salad or Soy/mirin/rice wine vinegar/wasabi becomes a jap dressing for a cold noodle salad etc. - adjust to your liking or add different additional ingredients while balancing these tastes.

Just have fun with what you know and have learned already. Trust yourselves.
Can I get an Amen!

The more you freestyle the easier it is to work out how to use up leftovers too...
 

Freediver

I can go full Karen
I'm making lokum/Turkish delight for the first time and I'm at that nervous stage where it just looks like a pot of glue.
Next I'm going to have a crack at halwa.
Both of these are being done with recipes so I guess that makes me a bit amateur.
It may have worked, I'm just waiting for it to cool down.
 
Top