Newbie Cooks: It Ain’t Your Fault!

Once again I had a novice home cook express discouragement. Try as she might, many of her recipes just didn’t turn out right. She was ready to go back to take-out. Which would have been a real shame.

Sadly, this isnt’t all that unusual. After three generations of people who use “cooking” and “microwaving” as synonyms, a lot of folks are coming back to real cooking. There are many reasons for this trend, which we need not go into here.

But, because they’re not grounded in the basics, they soon get discouraged; particularly when a recipe doesn’t deliver the look or taste indicated by its source. When that happens time and again, it’s easy to conclude that cooking isn’t your thing.

The one lesson beginning (and even more experienced) cooks need to learn is that it’s not their fault. There are a whole host of reasons why a recipe doesn’t meet expectations. Not knowing any better, you tend to blame yourself. “I must have done something wrong,” you think. Sometimes that’s true. But, more often than not, the fault lies with the recipe itself.

This just one of the reasons I teach methods and techniques, rather than recipes. Sure, I could teach my classes how to make, say, braised short ribs. And, forever after, they’ll be able to make a great short rib dish. But if, instead, I teach them how to braise, they’ll be able to make hundreds of great dishes. Plus, they’re recognize errors in recipes they read.

What I’m saying is simply this: If you’re one of those who’ve been taking it on the chin because your final dishes don’t deliver on the recipes’ promises, don’t despair. It’s probably not your fault at all.

Here are some pitfalls to be aware of:

It doesn’t look like the photo. This is, perhaps, the most common complaint I hear from beginners. They peruse a cookbook, or browse the web, see a photo that absolutely turns them on, and decide to make that dish. And it turns out looking nothing like the picture.
     Well, they don’t call it “food porn” for no reason. The thing to understand here is that the photos often have little to do with the recipe. Instead, a team of high-priced food stylists and photographers get together to produce eye candy. Often enough, the photo doesn’t even resemble the author’s intent. The recipe might, for instance, call for chicken breasts cut in thick slices. You look at the photo, and, behold! Legs and thighs are shown. Why? Because they’re prettier. From the stylist’s point of view, legs and thighs make a much more dramatic presentation. Perhaps they should actually read the recipe. “Chicken” is not a generic term.
    Food styling and presentation is a time-consuming art. If you want to learn it, that’s fine. But in the normal course of things, don’t be upset if your dish doesn’t resemble the photo. Concern yourself with producing the best tasting food you can. Fancy plating is nice. And can be fun. But it isn’t the point.

I followed the recipe exactly, but…..      The “buts” here are legion. Which is why, in my cooking classes, I stress the importance of technique. Recipes are merely guidelines, even when they’re well-written; which is often not the case. If you learn how to, for instance, pan-fry chicken breasts, and the directions in the recipe are wrong, you’ll spot it immediately, before making an understandable error.
     Some of the reasons recipes go wrong:

     -Ingredients are left out, or the amounts are wrong, or directions are incorrect. This is a very widespread problem, but is especially apparent in downloaded recipes. Most of the recipe-dump sites merely run with recipes gleaned elsewhere. By and large they are not kitchen tested. And the ingredients and directions often lose something in the posting. So you run into something like, “ ….add the XYZ…”, which was not included in the ingredients list. Or “…add two teaspoons of the pepper…” but the ingredients only listed a half teaspoon.
     One solution: Read the entire recipe, several times if necessary, to assure you recognize any such errors, and feel confident enough to correct them.

     -Equipment not normally found in a home kitchen is specified. This is most common with chef-written cookbooks. What they do is try and translate what they do in their restaurants to the home cook, forgetting that home equipment is not the same as they use every day.
     I recently made a dish that called for pan frying all the major ingredients in a “large” frying pan. I happen to have a 14-inch skillet---huge as home equipment goes---and had to do it in several batches. Just how large is large? The fact is, in a restaurant you won’t find any hummongeous skillets anyway. What you’ll see, in a case such as the above, is four, or five, or six smaller pans running simultaneously. That doesn’t work at home either.
     This same problem can affect methods as well. How often have you read “reduce until syrupy, about five minutes” only to discover that on your cooktop it took nearly 20 minutes to achieve that end. That’s because restaurant ranges burn considerably hotter than home versions, a fact often overlooked by chef-authors.
     Even the Culinary Institute of America suffered this problem in the first few of its At Home series. The books were intended to translate CIA’s teaching curriculum to home cooks. But they didn’t take into account that difference in equipment. To be fair, the later installments of the series did test recipes on home-style equipment. But that doesn’t help you if you’re working from the first four or five books.

     -Are they kidding! Professionals and foodies often suffer from an excess of chefiness, using terms and techniques that show off their knowledge. For someone new to the cooking game, however, it adds up to a lot of smoke and little, if any, fire.
     Using classical French terms is one of the ways they confuse rather than clarify. For instance, every size of a cube, from 1/16th inch on upwards, has a name. If they just said, “dice very small,” you might better understand them.
     The thing to understand with knife work is that the goal is to have everything done to the same size. Does it really matter if you cut that potato into batons instead of julienne? Not hardly. What can matter is that all those batons be of equal size. They not only look better, they cook more evenly. Good knife work is achieved through practice, not vocabulary.
     BTW, a “baton” is what we normally think a French fry looks like. Cut that lengthwise into four equally-sized strips and you’ll have a julienne. But I digress.
     It’s even worse with techniques. Mitchell Davis, author of “Kitchen Sense,” perhaps said it best: “I recall another recipe,” he says, “that had you strain a soup twice through a chinois. This sort of excess use of equipment and refinement (if you strain something once at home, I think it’s strained enough) is a hallmark of chef recipes…When we eat at home, the soup can be a little lumpy.”
     Or even a whole lot lumpy, in my opinion. That’s the difference between rustic and refined. But the soup will likely taste the same either way. And note the use of the word “chinois,” which is only a fancy strainer.
     Don’t let yourself be put off by all this. Just learn some of those terms and phrases; enough so you understand what’s being said, rather than what they’re saying. You’ll find yourself a much happier cook for it.

But it’s so and so’s ultimate hamburger (or chicken dish, or fish taco,
or whatever). Anytime I see or hear a recipe with the word “ultimate” in it I feel like hiding in the woodshed. There is no ultimate in food. No matter what it is, somebody is making it better---or will be doing so by tomorrow.
     More often than not, the “ultimate X” is merely somebody exercising their ego by combining ingredients that don’t necessarily go together. Or taking a plebian dish, fancying it up with unrelated tastes, and making it “special.” Similar in spirit is the word “fusion,” which usually translates as taking a run-of-the-mill ethnic dish, throwing in some Asian flavors, and calling the result spectacular. As often and not what it is is spectacularly awful.
     Your second biggest problem, as a beginner, is learning how flavors and textures work with each other. And that, my friend, depends on time in grade. You cannot start something today and expect to have 20 year’s experience by next Tuesday. So, concentrate on learning technique, and, as you do so, experiment with new flavors a little bit at a time.
     Your goal isn’t to make the ultimate burger. Nor even the second best the world has ever known. Work on producing the best burger you can. Then, over time, you can play with it to your heart’s content. But, at base, there will always be that straight forward, great tasting burger.
     But please, please, please, do me a favor. Don’t top it with a poached egg!     

       

Hmmmmm? Be hard to sauté on sand, Dave.

But, yeah, that's precisely the point.

Another aspectis that once you're comfortable with the various techniques, you can wing things. As I tell my students; Recipes? Recipes? We don' need no stinking recipes!"

That overstates the case, of course. But it frees them from the shackles imposed by formal recipes, and unleashes their own creativity.

Once you learn technique, and the way flavors work with each other, you can take any recipe and make it your own.

Glad to hear it, Melissa.

I've never understood the attitude of "I know it and you don't, ha, ha, ha" that many people on these forums have. We were all beginners at one time, and if there hadn't been people to help out, where would we be?

With the exception of my chili recipe, there's nothing I know that I'm not willing to share. And I believe that's true for most of the members of this community.

Outstanding, Brook! You've nailed it, and thanks to much of your advice, I am proud and happy to say that I've moved from many of the errors you enumerate above.