Improve Your Cooking Skills by Improvising
I hope you enjoy Starting from Scratch, my second book, published each week online, one chapter at a time. Before the book’s final publication, I hope to sprinkle readers’ thoughts, opinions and advice throughout. After all, you each have helpful systems and solutions in the kitchen worth sharing. In addition, for each section, I’m food bloggers and culinary experts – for this excerpt, it’s Dani Spies, author of a wonderful blog in her name.
Do you live and die by recipes when you’re cooking?
I will always read magazines and cookbooks to seek great recipes and discern which flavor combinations will create a pleasant sensation for the palette. Since I wasn’t born with the innate ability of a good friend – who can walk into the kitchen, smell ingredients and create amazing dishes from scratch – I usually prefer a rough framework to get me started.
Though I have gained more confidence to improvise in the kitchen over the years, I used to think recipes were the Holy Grail. I needed to measure everything precisely, using only what the recipe suggested, with no variations whatsoever. I picked any recipe that sounded good, regardless of how long it might take or how much it might cost to make.
Having a child has influenced budget as well as my strict adherence to ingredients lists and directions. Not only do I now prepare far less complex dishes, but I can no longer run out at a moment’s notice to pick up an ingredient I might be missing. This has forced me to experiment, and thus, become a better cook. Dani eloquently summarizes these sentiments: “Improvising is one of the best ways to begin to get more comfortable in the kitchen. Everyone has kitchen intuition; we just need to learn to begin to trust it!”
The next time you are following a recipe and run into speed bumps, you might consider these improvisations:
Use as much as you’ve got. All too often, in the middle of cooking dinner, I pull out olive oil, soy sauce, chicken broth, onions or fresh ginger and discover I’m short of what a recipe suggests using.In moments like these, don’t despair! If you can’t find a substitute, use as much as you have on hand and forget about it. Oftentimes you’ll never even miss what you left out.
Leave it out altogether. Maybe the dish you are trying to fix requires shallots, scallions, red peppers or some other ingredient you just happened to forget when you went to the store last week. Obviously, you’ll have to make a judgment call on whether or not the ingredient(s) is critical. But oftentimes, unless it’s the centerpiece (e.g., ahi tuna in my wonderful seared tuna with Asian slaw dish), you can probably skip it and still have a nice dish anyway.
Substitute something in its place. This is my favorite of all the “rules.” You can create something brand new by substituting a “secret” ingredient, often resulting in a dish that tastes better than the original. For example, you might try a different type of meat to add a new twist to an old dish. There’s a wonderful recipe in License to Grill for a pasta dish prepared with tuna, fried capers and a variety of other fresh, “summer” ingredients. One night when I didn’t want to trek over to the fishmonger and spend the money for fresh tuna, so I thawed some chicken instead. Now the recipe and its many variations have become a family favorite. (Not to mention, we now use fried capers, as a secret “substitute” ingredient in a number of dishes).
Until you experiment, alter and improvise, it’s hard to gain intuition about what types of ingredients to use when. Though I may never have the talent of smelling a dish and knowing what to add, at least I can taste and know. These sorts of skills and this sense of intuition come with time, practice and experimentation.
So the next time you are running low on something you need, or are out of it altogether, don’t sweat it. Try things a new or different way and you’ll gain a lot of cooking confidence in the process. And you may even save some time and money while you’re at it.
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