What's the secret to making delicious meals? Forget about recipes and just add more butter

[sl8]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/06/whats-the-secret-to-making-delicious-meals-forget-about-recipes-and-just-add-more-butter

Opinion

What’s the secret to making delicious meals? Forget about recipes and just add more butter

Nell Frizzell
I learned to cook by watching my mother, who flew around the kitchen in a flurry of post-work efficiency. She never measured a thing, but she taught me what it takes to feed people

Thu 6 Jun 2024 06.00 EDT

I don’t follow recipes. In fact, I think anyone who does is a giant baby.

[...]

Watching her in the kitchen was, I imagine, a little like observing the boiler room of a turn-of-the-century battleship: fires spitting, clouds of steam, incredible smells and loud banging. But it taught me what it takes to feed people. Being there, helping her where I could, showed me that every meal should involve something dry, something wet, something green; a carbohydrate, a protein and lots of veg. To this day, she uses butter and salt like other people use water. As a result, everything she makes is delicious.

People who can’t make a bowl of pasta or a cake without poring over a book or a website make me feel like a flat tyre. It’s food, not science. There is no single “right” way. Like kissing, cooking is something you have to practise until people stop gagging.

Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood

[Siwsan]

1. For the most part, I consider recipes to be 'suggestions'

The only ones I follow semi-closely are for dry ingredients in baked goods. Once I get the dough/batter done, I use my imagination when it comes to additional ingredients. Actually, my whole family does the same thing. Taste - add something - taste - think of something else to add.

My former brother in law is just the opposite. He follows recipes with an exactness that drives the rest of us crazy.

[EYESORE 9001]

2. I feel the same way

I’m fortunate to have developed rudimentary cooking skills sufficient to attempt most recipes, but I inevitably make substitutions.

[TeamProg]

3. Salt, fat, sugar - the American Food Pyramid. nt

[MOMFUDSKI]

4. I don't cook with a recipe but I do follow

amounts for baking. There is no winging it in baking.

[Warpy]

5. Gee, Neal, judgmental much?

We have a couple of generations out there who have never learned how to cook. Oh, they can scramble eggs, make toast, make coffee in a coffee maker and slap a sandwich together with store bread and deli sliced meats. But they can't COOK. For them, following recipes to the letter is essential until tasting what each ingredient does to the whole dish lets them get a feel for what they like and what they don't like. At that point, they can use recipes as basic guidelines but no longer follow them carefully.

Learning any skill is a process of starting with the basics and that's what recipes are, especially in some of the better books that illustrate things like proper knife skills. While people who know how to cook regard them as crutches and sneer, there's nothing wrong with crutches if that's what you need to get around. I've broken enough bones to learn that.

And no, Neal,throwing more butter into a dish doesn't make it better, that only works on northern European and some Indian fare. Try it with Mediterranean or East Asian food, you are not going to like what happens. Besides, butter, while far better than margarine or any solid vegetable fat, is still not good for you in large quantities.

So if you're a non cook, watching videos and plodding through a copy of Fannie Farmer or The Joy of Cooking, you are not alone and kudos to you for wanting to learn an essential skill. You'll get there and eventually you'll do Grandma cooking, a handful of this and a handful of that with great results. You just have to start at the beginning.

(My mother hated cooking and it showed, so no real cooking skills to be had there. Julia Child did her best, supplemented by Fannie Farmer, buyt I needed them both to teach me what I'd missed)

[Saviolo]

6. I mean... a little right and also very wrong?

Cooking really is more about techniques than recipes. Once you've got some techniques down, you can start substituting whatever you want, and making an infinite variety of dishes using the same techniques. That being said, recipes are a great place to start learning. As you do more recipes, you learn that, "Oh, this one is a roux-based sauce, too..." or "Oh, these aromatics are the base of allllll these different recipes."

And if you wonder why restaurant food tastes different from when you cook at home, the answer is almost always more salt and more butter.

Additionally, by and large, people undercook things. You can't caramelize onions in ten minutes. You can't properly brown mushrooms in five minutes. I frequently see recipes with "Sautee the onions until golden (about five minutes)." No. That's not how any of this works.

[Warpy]

7. It's also knowing what flavors will complement each other and what will hang up on a tonsil.

Ever watch Gordon Ramsey? America's Worst Cooks? Sometimes Gordon finds a restaurant taking shortcuts with prepared and frozen food that isn't exactly bad, but customers could have assembled that shit at home. Sometimes he finds creative cooks and those are my favorite shows, I remember one shrimp and banana dish that had me wondering how many packs a day the chef was managing to smoke. Salami with canned white frosting cuz ya ran outta mayo, they look alike, nobody will know the difference is just never going to turn out well.

People who have never cooked are going to want ingredient lists at first, it's the only way. Videos supply technique, as long as they're not Cooking with Jack or Kay's Cooking (biggest culinary trainwrecks on the net).

Beginning cooks need both. Fortunately, we live in a time when they can be gotten from someone outside the family of non cooks and without spending a fortune at CIA or the equivalent.

[Saviolo]

8. For sure, recipes are 100% the starting point

From there it's all pattern recognition.

I'm always shocked by how much those chefs on Kitchen Nightmares or even Hell's Kitchen smoke. No wonder they all fail the blind taste test! They all smoke like chimneys! I wouldn't be able to even be in the same room as all of them.

As a YouTube food creator, I'm always so frustrated at how the worst cooks on the platform get the most hate clicks. We do good recipes that we test and taste good. Hubby was trained in culinary school, worked at both fine dining and quick service restaurants, and owned his own restaurant for a while. I guess it's just we don't have a comedic hook or anything. We specifically wanted to make it all about the food, but that just doesn't catch eyeballs, mostly.

(Also, Jack turned out to be a complete piece of shit)

[Warpy]

9. "Anti Chef" is a gulty pleasure of mine

because I'm revisiting my youth as I tried to learn how to cook using books and the occasional Julia Child broadcast for technique tips. It's been wonderful to see him grow, but he's not quite able to put it together (this recipe went wrong but why? Books by top chefs are hard to follow, but why? OK, he's starting to pick up on the latter).

I'm not surprised the King of Salmonella (Jack) turned out to be a total shit. He's a lazy SOB who's take on cooking was the Quentin Crisp method: just put everything into a pot and stir. While that mogjt be edible to the upper midwest church supper crowd, it's not the kind of thing any sane person would want to advertise to millions on YouTube, especially when eating bloody chicken was part of it.

Kay's Cooking is probably the most atrocious thing out there that isn't a complete troll. She seems like a sweet granny lady, she just doesn't know anything about cooking. It's painful to watch.

[Saviolo]

10. Love Anti Chef

He has learned a lot about how food works in following a bunch of recipes, and he's both ambitious and dogged. He really takes aim at quite complex recipes, and sticks with them to the end. These Marco Pierre White videos have been pretty funny.

Yeah, Jack turned out to be an abusive piece of crap. AugustTheDuck did a video about his appearance on a podcast (the name of the video is "Cooking with Jack is a Terrible Person&quot where he casually talks about choking out his son, then complaining that the son has "rage issues."