Technique: Reading a recipe

 

Most recipes don't need anything more than general measurements, and in fact relying on measurements can be deleterious to those wishing to learn how to cook. The reasons for this are several. 

First, it hinders learning because if you simply follow a formula, you can't learn how things work. It's like assembling Ikea furniture hoping you will learn carpentry. You won't learn cooking technique unless you're truly present, observing, engaging with your food, and using all five senses. Like painting, cooking is simply the art of understanding not only each ingredient's characteristic but how each ingredient interacts with each other. 

There are different shades of color which can all be called "red" but you also know that mixing red and yellow create orange. Its the same with cooking except that the chemistry is more complicated, partly due to the reactions caused by heat: a fascinating energy that can solidify an egg while liquefying a tomato. 

Then there are ways to cook without heat: coagulation, fermentation, curing, dehydrating. I find it no coincidence that so many terms used in cooking were also used by the ancient practitioners of alchemy. It really is a form of magic.

The second reason is that we all have our individual tastes, and thus inclined to add more or less of a thing, omit or add others. And each ingredient, like us, has its own persona. Just as the color "red" can not be defined as one particular hue, a tomato, even among the same clutch, can have a varying degree of acidity or sweetness, olive oils too can vary greatly in flavor, and this goes for anything else in your kitchen. 

Thus if a recipe is followed word for word, multiply this variance in ingredients over the whole process and the end result is that if you made ten recipes exactly the same, you will still have ten subtly different results. You'll wonder why you liked it better one time and yet on another you'll wonder what you did wrong. It wasn't that you missed a step; the ingredients had a story to tell you before they went into the pot, but they weren't heard. 

Over time, you will learn to compensate for this variance, but compensation comes with familiarity with your ingredients and critical thinking. In turn, that happens by engaging yourself with what you're doing rather than following steps. Start by tasting everything when its on the cutting board, when its halfway through cooking, and at the end. Observe how the texture and flavors have changed. With this information you begin to acquire the skill of predicting the end result of your ingredients, all of which are individually changed in flavor by their journey through the cooking process. Being a skilled cook simply means that you can foresee these chemical changes that will occur among all the ingredients when cooked and steer them all into one desired intersection. It is not an esoteric skill, in fact it becomes second nature, the same way you already know that mixing red and yellow make orange. 

Though accurate measurements are indispensable in any craft, the terms "pinch, dash, sprinkle, splash, dollop," are more than enough to correctly describe the cooking process because, thanks to the vividness of English, the words themselves imply a particular amount. You know that a pinch is literally that, and you know that dollop means more than a tablespoon but still only the one spoon. To say "add 1 and 1/16th teaspoon" is both useless and tedious. 

Cooking will never be math and approaching it as such will rob you of building a mental repertoire which is the basis for the art of cooking, which is at its core a technique of weaving together a cohesive relationship out of separate substances. The Philosopher's Stone has been with us all along.