Adapting Recipes with Substitute Ingredients

[Food4thought]

Often I see a nice recipe online but some of the ingredients may not be easily available where I live. Sometimes there might be an ingredient I don't like or don't want to look buy. Usually, if I want to try it anyway, I will adapt the recipe by substituting another ingredient, or missing something out.

One example might be a spice seasoning that is not generally available or one it too strong for my taste. Then I simply use a spice that I know and like in its place.

Vegetables and fruits that are not be available can generally be replaced by something similar.

I make a lovely pasta dish from a recipe I found online, but instead of using cream I add some canned cream of mushroom soup, which contains a little cream but it has fewer calories and adds more to the taste.

 

[OhioTom76]

I try to follow a recipe exactly as written, at least once, to make sure I tried it as intended, before making modifications to it. Sometimes, the ingredients or amount of a given ingredient may seem way off to me, only to be pleasantly surprised afterwards with the results. I had an experience like this with a dry rub recipe that I was trying out, which seemed to have way too much black pepper in it, but in the end, it worked out perfectly. That said, every once in a while it winds up being a typo that the author made and it totally screws up the dish, but at that point at least I can safely say there was an error, and it didn't taste correct at all.

 

[Chris_A]

I do this as well. Some exotic ingredients that many recipes require, mainly Asian recipes, are very hard to obtain in my country. I try to use the next best thing that I can get reasonably cheap and easily here. The results are often very very good, even if you don`t use the exact same ingredients from the recipe.

 

[Jade]

I usually try to follow recipes as closely as I can especially the first time, just so I can get the hang of the basics before messing around with it, but if there is an ingredient that I dislike, I'm okay with substituting and finding out if my substitute ingredient could work or not, and it often does because it's not very hard to imagine which substitutes would probably go best in particular recipes.