Culinary school was good for a number of things, but not all of those things can I recollect at once. They come to me one at a time. In baking and pastry, the second cooking class in as many quarters, the chef instructor tried to teach our passive, inattentive classroom the value of smelling and listening in the kitchen. What could be more obvious? Except that she could hear the smallest of eggshell fragments as it fell into the stainless bowl of a 60-quart mixer from across the room. Another time, she stopped mid-lecture to sniff the air and report “something is burning.” And, of course, it was. But mistake prevention is only learned the hard way.
But she was right. Detecting the difference in the smell of the stages of bacon cookery can help you “save the bacon.” There’s a fine line when it comes to everyone’s personal preference for bacon, and it’s a matter of seconds between crispy and too crispy.
Today, I was making a chicken dish and realized that I might be a little short on broth. I cut some onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and other miscellaneous ingredients to begin a cheater’s vegetable broth. It was missing an ingredient or two, but it was just a broth to fortify what I had, just in case. And then the phone rang.
Not only did the phone ring, the call went on, and on, and on. It was an impromptu phone screen that couldn’t be rushed. Half an hour later, something didn’t seem right. Had I put something in the oven? As the call wound down, I realized what I had done. The broth had reduced down to a scorched, black tar and a stench that doesn’t easily go away.
Cooking doesn’t come easily and recipes aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. Through trial and error, I have come to learn that simply feeling more comfortable in a kitchen is the first step towards the mastery of cooking. Mistakes are still important building blocks of learning in the kitchen and the learning never ends. I still have to remind myself to cook at lower temperatures. Setting a stovetop burner to high is a recipe for disaster, whether in a commercial kitchen or a home kitchen. And the smell that a burnt pan of food leaves is the stubborn kind of smell that sticks in your nose, and reminds you to slow down and enjoy what you’re doing.
Recipes serve different purposes for different people. Some cooks use them as a crutch, and that’s OK. Some people use recipes as stepping stones to the next stage in their development of being a cook. Day One of culinary school, Chef Barr taught everyone to never trust a recipe. The glances around the room, from student to student, indicated that this might be harder than we thought. See, we had just received hundreds and hundreds of recipe handouts to put in our three-ring notebooks. Recipe mastery, we thought, would be one of the secrets to our success. If we couldn’t trust these recipes, what good would they serve? Who or what can we trust?
Cooking some dishes is like playing horseshoes – close is good enough. But using leavening ingredients like baking soda, baking powder, or yeast, without a recipe might lead to disastrous results. While working in our culinary school’s student-run restaurant, I remember accidentally adding twice as much yeast as a focaccia recipe called for. The dough was made the day before service so it wouldn’t be baked for 24 hours, long enough for me and everyone else to cycle through to their next station in the kitchen. I was working on the grill when the baking-pastry station erupted into laughter as someone paraded through the kitchen with an expanded “mile-high” focaccia, completely unusable for lunch that day. Had I followed the recipe, it was a proven recipe that would have netted good results rather than the humiliation that was served up that day. I deserved it.
We would go on to encounter our share of recipe inaccuracies. Ultimately, I concluded that recipes are an essential part of every functioning kitchen. But so, too, is the experience and skill that accumulates over time and allows one to cook confidently, occasionally improvising and inventing along with way. More importantly, it takes time and shouldn’t be rushed.
I’ve never been a fan of the premise of Food Network’s Worst Cooks in America. However, I recently received an article and slideshow called “Worst Cooks in America: Top 10 Cooking Mistakes.” It’s a worthy read, and coming in at Number 3? Not reading the recipe. I may not like the show, but that is good advice.
Food Network
Sure, there’s plenty of room for improvising and substituting. But do yourself the favor of reading the recipe all the way through before starting to cook, so at least you’ll know what’s coming.
MOJO to Table 