Cooking Without A Recipe

I identify as a cook - I may not be a chef but I am certainly a good cook and know a thing or two about food science, nutrition, and food handling, and safety. Personally, I have an aversion to meat so I haven’t bothered to become an expert on meat dishes or meat in general but for everything else, I enjoy and take great pride in learning. Every day, I learn something new and a few years ago, I realized that I didn’t quite care for recipes.

Here’s a challenge: how about instead of following recipes, we understand how food works and the chemistry behind it? Recipes are easy to understand however, hard to follow. Following recipes has never been an issue for me, however, I do find it very limiting to creativity and innovation. To add, the recipes I find online are rarely exact so I understand there is a lot of room for human error - both on my end and from the recipe developer.

I want to propose something - let’s try to understand the very basic concepts of cooking. Let’s learn together and discuss food and the way it’s cooked and how it reacts with other ingredients. If you can understand that, then you can make any recipe or better yet, you can save recipes when you’ve made an error and cook anything out of random ingredients. Baking can be a little challenging as the room for error is higher - much higher. But even in baking, once you understand the core concepts, the science behind the reactions, you’ll be able to avert many disasters and even create your own wonderful and unique creations.

That’s the skill level I’d like to challenge you to get to and it’s actually more simple than you think. Firstly, you have to be interested in learning about food. If you’ve got that, then that’s all we need to start.

I will be writing a series of posts focusing on one ingredient at a time (or various food-related themes). The goal here is to understand the ingredients themselves to the point where you can confidently comprehend how to work with them.

Until then, please note that I encourage you to cook without a recipe and change things up!