Recipe or Improvisation?

lizzief79

lizzief79

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When I was a chef, the ingredients included in each dish were carefully weighed and measured following a recipe to ensure that every dish served was identical to the last one. If people order a meal one week and come in and order the same dish again the next week they expect it to be exactly the same. Quality control.

At home I cook in an entirely different way. I never make soup the same way twice. What needs using up out of the refrigerator gets thrown in. If I make a curry, it generally has similar ingredients in but I never measure, I just work on taste. Occasionally I throw a random ingredient in that I don't usually use just to see how it goes. When my children ask me to make them pasta carbonara it is a dish that only barely resembles a true Italian carbonara. It is just the name we give it. Mine is pasta, cream cheese, cream, smoked bacon and mushrooms. I do lots of dishes like this and regularly make something up out of ingredients that I know everyone likes. I think I get away with it because I have natural cooking ability and some experience working professionally. I instinctively know what will work. The only things I really measure at home are cakes.

Do you prefer recipes or do you improvise and experiment in the kitchen?
 
I definitely improvise. For me, a major part of the fun I get out of cooking is improvising and deviating from traditional recipes and indications. Of course you cannot go truly overboard with what you do, but in a small measure it`s perfectly OK to do in my opinion. I also almost never add spices and such exactly according to a recipe and go mostly by gut feeling.
 
When it comes to cooking, I usually start with a recipe for my first attempt. I like to see how everything comes together in the way that it was intended. Once I am more familiar with cooking an item I might then do a little experimentation. We all have ingredients we like and don't like and often I will substitute one vegetable for another or even one meat for another.

Some foods are more suitable for adjusting the recipe than others. While it is often easy to swap one type of cheese for another, swapping wheat flour for rice flour doesn't always work. Soup is a very flexible dish. I never make it the same way twice and it isn't soup de jour but rather soup of the fridge.
 
Always improvise. Each and every time. I honestly can't remember the next time that I measured anything except for the amount of potatoes I was going to boil or the amount of eggs going into omelettes. Anything other than that kind of things, I never measure them. I just throw things in and see what happens.

And my improvisation doesn't just stop at the amount, I also regularly change ingredients when I feel like it.
 
If I am cooking a recipe that is totally new to me, then I will follow it (almost) to the letter - I say almost because I hate salt and can't abide the taste of it (in my childhood I could not use toothpaste and had to use salt instead!) so will chance all recipes salt quantities.

After I have cooked a recipe once, I will still have the recipe to hand as a guide but then I freelance. I now have some meals where they are nowhere near close to the original recipe and only I can cook them. I will still have the recipe to hand much to my husband's amusement.
 
When I'm just trying something out, I will follow a recipe. The more that I make a certain dish, the more it becomes "mine." When I feel comfortable enough, I'll start to throw my own twist on a dish. One thing I always do is ask my husband how he would change something. He always manages to offer an idea that I hadn't thought of and I'll usually incorporate it or at least try it! I like his feedback because he isn't critical (so it doesn't hurt my feelings, lol).

I know one recipe I used to follow down to the letter was how to make cheese sauce. For some reason, the recipe I had was really complicated. One day, I realized that I could make it way easier than the recipe I had, so now I just do my own cheese sauce recipe :)
 
I'm definitely an improviser.

Typically, I'll create a new idea out of an old ingredient, which sends me to the Internet for recipes. I'll read several, but most importantly, I'll read the reviews. Then, I'll figure out something that sounds good based on everything I've read and added to what ingredients I already have on hand.

I rarely go to the grocery store with a list of ingredients to fill a recipe. I'm not a fan of buying something for one dish, especially if it isn't something I will likely be able to use again in a variety of ways.

I also find myself turning to recipes specifically for cooking times. When it comes to meat, cook time is the one thing I just don't have a natural handle on. I'm good about knowing what kind of flavor combinations will taste good, and trying different things that usually end up coming out well, but I'm not always sure about how long nor how hot to cook things.
 
I totally get it about the cooking times! I'm weird about meat. I always check the cooking times for that because I really don't want to serve bad meat, lol. I don't feel confident with meat cooking times. I like you, I know what will taste good ON meat but I need a little help with the cooking time. Hopefully the more I do it, the more confident I'll become and I won't worry about serving bad meat. For now though, I'd rather be safe than sorry. My mom is a meat master. I guess because she's been doing it for so long, she just doesn't think about it. She never looks at recipes for anything and I think I've learned that technique from her.
 
For actual dishes for family meals, I tend to follow recipes as I don't really trust myself enough to start experimenting then. For solo meals, however, I afford myself a little bit more room for experimentation, because I'd be the only one who has to eat the food if ever it came out less than average.
 
I'm an improv cook too. I will try a recipe as its written one time and then start to play with it when I make the food again. I don't try my improvisational meals on anyone but myself, once I am satisfied with it then I let others eat it.
 
I tend to do a mixture of both. If it's a dish I've never cooked before - I'll try to stick to the recipe as much as possible so I wont screw up. After that when I make it again I'll add or take away things to make sure it's something I'd love to eat. Things that easy to change or add ingredients to - soup, casseroles, pasta - I'll do just that some days depending on what I have on hand.
 
It's one thing if you cook professionally and/or have been properly trained - you have the experience to make educated guesses as to what will and won't work. You're not entirely winging it. But the person who seldom cooks can come up with some pretty atrocious stuff. My dad is notorious for doing this when he suddenly decides he wants to "cook" something. He just starts grabbing any old thing here and there and throwing it in the pan until it becomes this giant mountain of "stuff" that we can barely recognize.

One of his most recent concoctions was veggie burger patties mixed with ground beef (I'm not kidding) cooked with onions, then he started pouring a little of this and a little of that from the condiments in the fridge - I think he grabbed the bottle of sweet & sour sauce and maybe some Worcestershire sauce. He probably would have started cutting up some hot dogs and tossing them in there too if we didn't stop him.
 
I remembered I began to had this passion for cooking when I was in high school always watching my mother while cooking in the kitchen with my notepad and pen ready to wrote down some of her recipes that we all love eating. She is a good cook and I am grateful I am the only one among her daughters who follow her footsteps. Now that I am married already her recipes are still with me and I improvised and innovated some of the recipes which she dearly said it had taste better. I am also watching cooking shows most of the times and read cooking books which I had some at home. I do also watched some recipes online for learning more and for my reference too. Then I experiment and improvise out of these recipes because I really loves cooking :)
 
I pretty much always improvise, no two of my dishes ever come out exactly the same. It's quite fun to add in a bit if this and that and just go according to taste, sometimes i add in herbs just for texture, like putting mixed herbs in mash. Also experimenting with different combinations of tastes from different seasonings is not bad, one might discover an unlikely mixture! I never measure what I'm putting in, a dash of this with an extra little bit for good measure and roberts your mothers brother!
 
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