For many people, cooking is about far more than simply putting food on the table and providing fuel for daily life. Preparing food can be a source of relaxation, enjoyment, and satisfaction, but all too often people also have a sense of anxiety in the kitchen. Much of this feeling stems from a fear of getting things wrong, and it frequently means people stick to the safety blanket of following other people’s recipes to the letter.
This is a shame, as breaking free from the strictures of recipes is a liberating step for a cook to take, and has the potential to greatly improve both your culinary skills and your enjoyment of them. Here’s why.
Recipes Are Unreliable
Even the most well-written and carefully tested recipe should, at best, serve as a starting point for your own efforts. There’s so much variation when it comes to cooking equipment, ingredient quality, and even the weather conditions that no recipe will give the same results twice running. If you’re too wedded to the precise details set out in print, you won’t have the flexibility to compensate for all of these variables, and may even blame yourself needlessly when things don’t go quite as expected.
Tastes Differ
One cook’s ambrosia is another one’s poison, but even within those two extremes, no recipe will be perfect for everyone. Part of the joy of cooking is customizing a dish to suit your own tastes. You should never be afraid to venture away from the confines of any recipe you’re inspired by, whether you simply tweak the proportions of the ingredients, or introduce new elements altogether to take the dish in a different direction.
Working with Your Store Cupboard
Some recipes call for dozens of ingredients and are remarkably prescriptive about exactly what you should be using to cook the dish. However, even the most well-stocked of store cupboards will lack some of the more obscure ingredients, but this shouldn’t stop you from attempting a dish using whatever you have to hand. Few recipes are so precious that a minor variation will kill them stone dead, but if you’re afraid to experiment with the top dishes in Sydney, your ability to put something together at short notice will often be limited by the precise contents of your larder.
Be Unique and Inventive
Once you gain confidence through modifying existing recipes, whether because of a lack of ingredients or simply to suit personal taste, you’ll begin to develop ideas for your own unique dishes. What began as a tweak to someone else’s idea can quickly take on its own life and become something to call your own, with all the satisfaction that brings.
