Cooking from the hip, versus following recipes

[nakji]

This week I have a lot of free time, since I'm off on vacation. I'm tackling a lot of "recipes" I've bookmarked as wanting to try, and since I have the time to go through some complicated processes with a reasonable sense of attention and a clear mind.

Contrast that to my normal state of mind when I get home in the evening - I need to get dinner on the table in under an hour and reading anything, let alone a set of directions, is going to grind things to a halt.

Most of my cooking involves opening a refrigerator; seeing what's there, and cooking straight from the hip, using methods and processes I've long ago committed to memory. Vegetables cooked in olive oil to make a sauce; pasta. Ground meat with ginger-garlic-green onion- chili base over a green vegetable; rice. Pan-seared protein; pan reduction sauce; mashed potatoes; salad. On the weekends, I may try a new recipe - if it's simple enough to commit to memory, it'll get rotated into the weeknight repertoire.

But I'd say for me, I'm generally lucky to add one new recipe to that mix a month.

How often do you try new recipes, versus just plain "cooking from memory"? Do any of us attempt any of those "weeknight kitchen"/"30-minute meals" recipes?

[heidih]

I would make the boundaries even wider. I almost never cook from a recipe unless it is baking. On the savory side I am not necessarily cooking "from memory", but I layer my existing knowledge over a recipe or description I see and I go my own way. Not necessarily smart but it works for me. The one useful thing I have done recently is to keep a file folder on the counter and write down what I am doing so that if it is successful I can replicate when memory, as often, fails.

[SobaAddict70]

I do (from the hip) all the time.

That being said, I think you have to have some basic grounding which can take any variety of form before attempting to go at it alone. Otherwise you might end up with Kwanzaa Cake (a la Sandra Lee).

Edited February 2, 2011 by SobaAddict70 (log)

[djyee100]

I notice that "shoot from the hip" cooks are the first ones to post.

I try out new recipes in spurts--the cooking activity matches lulls in my project deadlines. While I've never counted the number of recipes, it probably averages to 2, maybe 3, new recipes per month. I don't bother with special "30-minute recipes," because I feel comfortable cooking an inpromptu dish on my own.

On busy days I'll pile ingredients on the counter and throw together a stirfry, pasta dish, or salad. If vegetables are rotting in my fridge, I'll improvise a soup. I have no problem with cooking a simple recipe from a cookbook, usually something I've tried before, so I know where I'm going with it.

Years ago I used to do mostly "shoot from the hip" cooking. These days, if I have the time and energy, I like to cook recipes. I want to check out what the great cooks are doing. By cooking their recipes, I expand my cooking techniques and repertoire. I'll closely follow a recipe the first time I try it; after that, I may adjust it more to my taste. When I buy a cookbook, I try to cook at least 15 recipes from it. My aim is to get a good idea of the author's style, and what he/she is trying to do. The 15-recipe rule slows down my cookbook-buying habits, too.

Edited February 2, 2011 by djyee100 (log)

[Mjx]

I don't think I've ever tried any 30-minute recipes, at least not ones that were specifically designated as such.

Some things I routinely improvise; new recipes I often follow to the letter, at least the first time. After that, I'll usually begin to tweak things, but I often do this sitting over the recipe and making a shopping list.

[annachan]

I love cookbooks and have tons of them. However, I rarely (except for baking/confectionery) follow recipes. I tend to learn methods of cooking, and adjust the ingredients to my liking.

Also, I find that I only follow recipes when I have the time to do so. So often we have to just get in the kitchen and whip up a meal, there is no time to even find a recipe.

[rooftop1000]

After reading this I wondered into the kitchen for a sip of soda and thought about my friend saying on Saturday that she can follow recipes very well but still doesn't think she knows what goes together on her own.

As I recalled this I thought about an amazing marinated pork chop with papaya salsa she had made us one night, and looked at the chicken wings in my fridge. Somehow it has now been decided that half those wings will be marinated in Jerk paste and served with pineapple salsa and half will just be Buffalo style.

Recipes are for getting ideas, arent they?

tracey

Edited February 2, 2011 by rooftop1000 (log)

[andiesenji]

I would make the boundaries even wider. I almost never cook from a recipe unless it is baking. On the savory side I am not necessarily cooking "from memory", but I layer my existing knowledge over a recipe or description I see and I go my own way. Not necessarily smart but it works for me. The one useful thing I have done recently is to keep a file folder on the counter and write down what I am doing so that if it is successful I can replicate when memory, as often, fails.

This is essentially my routine. Baking does require fairly strict adherence to certain ratios of ingredients.

However, just plain cookin' can be freestyle or "from the hip" with great results. Since I get so involved that I forget to write things down, I have a mini recorder that is voice activated (which works fine if I make an ahhhh or ummmmm noise before I begin speaking what I want to record, otherwise it won't record the first couple of words.)

When I have a free minute I can transcribe it into Word or TextEdit and go from there.

I like collecting recipes (not to mention cookbooks) but I seldom follow them to the letter (except for "classic" recipes which I will do at least once before any alterations).

For me a recipe is sort of like a road map which I can use to get to a certain location and from there can go off on little individual jaunts of my own.

I learned to cook from women who rarely used cookbooks because they kept everything in their heads.

My grandparent's cook had limited ability to read and write but had an enormous repertoire of some quite complicated "receipts" in her memory, including a lot of very fancy cakes (an enormous Lady Baltimore cake was one such).

My grandmother did not do a lot of cooking but had her specialties, as did a couple of my aunts and great-aunts, who liked to show off their cooking skills. Some used receipts and some didn't but they were all very good cooks.

[Lolagranola74]

Have been thinking about posing this question myself for sometime...

I was lucky enough to have two parents who were/are both amazing cooks, who could not have been more different in their approaches and I learned so much from both of them. My beloved dad, a restaurateur, was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of cook- never a recipe, only owned a few cookbooks and taught me that once you mastered the basic techniques, you could replicate and invent anything you wanted. Of course, it helped that he had a killer palate. On the flip side, the kitchen looked like the day after Armageddon whenever he cooked- seasonings all over the counter-tops, flour all over the floor, congealed gravy dribbling down the cabinet doors, vegetable peelings perfectly placed for you to slip on and break your neck- and needless to say he couldn't bake to save his life. Conversely, my mom, who worked as a caterer for many years, almost never cooks anything without consulting a recipe first even if she's made it a hundred times before, has an extensive collection of cookbooks which I've claimed as my rightful inheritance, ALWAYS cleans as she goes so the kitchen is immaculate by the time the meal is served and bakes the most ethereal cookies, cakes and pies.

As for me- I like to think I combine the best of both of them when I'm in the kitchen. I love to read recipes and collect cookbooks but see them as inspiration rather than prescription. One of my joys is to taste something new in a restaurant and then try to recreate it at home using the palate my dad spent years educating. I ALWAYS clean as I go but Lord knows I suck at baking!

[OliverB]

I'm actually trying to force myself to cook from some recipes lately. For one, since I got a little Sous Vide setup, but also because some 250 cookbooks are using up a very large amount of space on my book shelf, and I feel the urge to justify that.

But also, I'm getting bored with my hip shooting. Not that it's bad, not at all, but there's a tendency to go the same route (though I never really cook the exact same thing twice) and it gets too predictable. I also used to cook a lot of Thai food, haven't done that in a long time for no particular reason. I love to cook on fire and the weather here is just about getting to where that's an option every day again (sorry blizzard bound folks! NorCal just has a nice climate). Hopefully I'll be putting my 6shooters away more often now and try out new stuff, in a sense, make new bullets for the old guns to shoot in a different direction - from the hip :-)

[nolnacs]

In thinking about this topic, it is interesting how my constraints shape the way I have been cooking. I moved to Philadelphia a little over a year ago and quickly decided that I wanted to do most of my grocery shopping at the Reading Terminal market, the Italian market or the local farmer's market (Headhouse Sq). The only problem is that due to my work schedule, I can only make it to those places on the weekends. So, in response, I started planning weekly menus so that I would have all the ingredients that I would need for the upcoming week. Previously, when I was in Chicago, I tended to just pick things up that caught my eye and then cook based off those and perhaps a recipe that caught my eye. Much as OliverB commented, my cooking was often a bit repetitious.

When I started menu planning, I started making a point of trying new recipes, usually 3 or 4 a week. I don't faithfully follow all of them, but I usually plan my alterations ahead of time (substituting or leaving out ingredients etc). It's been an interesting experience and I have definitely learned a lot, but I do wonder if I have perhaps swung a little too far the other direction.

[Homebrew Guy]

I'm usually a hip-shooter during the week as I work full time and cook what I know for my family. However, I too am trying to menu plan and working on expanding my repertoire with some recipes. Not to mention, I am learning to use my new pressure cooker, so recipes and time tables are a recent staple. I'm not a line-by-line recipe follower though. I use them more for inspiration. I'm doing some experimentation with spherification and the like as well, so again, recipes are very useful.

[kayb]

I'm some of both. I've had some horrible experiences shooting from the hip, as well as some good ones. I have my standards that I can make in my sleep, for which I never consult a recipe, and often vary by changing out the protein or the spice or whatever. Then I have things I try from a recipe, and note to myself (with a post-it on the cookbook page) that next time I want to try it using x instead of y. Sometimes I make substitutions I know will work -- I can sub beef chuck for short ribs, or vice versa. And when I bake -- a fair amount in the winter, little if any in the summer -- I follow recipes religiously. I do find that what often happens is that I wind up reading past some critical piece of the instructions and getting the assembly portion wrong...which is OK in some cases, not so much in others.

My from-the-hip on weeknights has been modified a bit since I've gotten in the habit of cooking on the weekend with an eye toward repurposing the leftovers in something else later on in the week. So I generally have something of a menu plan.

[BeatriceB]

Hi! I'm new to posting, but not to reading here.

This topic is interesting. I've found that I start as a recipe-follower with a technique or cuisine that's new to me. Once I've made a number of dishes following recipes using that technique or within that cuisine, I move on to looking at recipes for ideas, inspiration, and then modifying them to make them my own. Once I'm truly confident with a technique or a particular set of flavors I've become fond of, I don't use recipes at all. So, for me, recipes are valuable, no matter how experienced I am, since there are always new techniques and flavor combinations for me to learn.

On the other hand, I think it is incredibly valuable to have a base of essential (whatever that means to you) techniques and flavor combinations that you know and love, and know how to manipulate and play with without any recipes. No one could possibly have that total familiarity with all world cuisines, so my view has become that it is useful to focus on a few cuisines that most interest you (and that perhaps you already have familiarity with) and become knowledgeable and confident with them, because there is huge value in being able to improvise. But then gradually work out to other cuisines using recipes as learning tools.

[C. sapidus]

BeatriceB - good points, and welcome!

When cooking for myself, I tend to shoot from the hip. When cooking for others I am far more likely to cook from a recipe, taking liberties as appropriate and necessary.

The “problem” is that I love trying new dishes from many different cuisines. Repeating a dish seems like a missed opportunity to try something new and interesting, so except for a few favorites I rarely cook the same recipe twice in a year.

This is a big change from my bachelor days, when I had a very small rotation of recipes that repeated every week or two. After a while, I stopped reading the recipes and my versions inevitably strayed from the original. This worked fine until I started cooking for more than one person, and discovered the difficulty in scaling up from a-glug-of-this-and-handful-of-that.

Some of my improvised recipes have been lost forever.

[nakji]

When cooking for myself, I tend to shoot from the hip. When cooking for others I am far more likely to cook from a recipe, taking liberties as appropriate and necessary.

The “problem” is that I love trying new dishes from many different cuisines. Repeating a dish seems like a missed opportunity to try something new and interesting, so except for a few favorites I rarely cook the same recipe twice in a year.

I'm the same way, but limited by my raw ingredients. Still, most traditional cuisines have a focus on fresh vegetables that I'm almost always able to find.

Some of my improvised recipes have been lost forever.

An inevitable by-product of this style of cooking. Some hyper-organized people, I hear, keep kitchen notebooks to record things like that in. I envy them.

[Pierogi]

....

The “problem” is that I love trying new dishes from many different cuisines. Repeating a dish seems like a missed opportunity to try something new and interesting, so except for a few favorites I rarely cook the same recipe twice in a year.

...

Bruce, you absolutely NAILED it. I usually make a few regular old standbys once or twice a year (cabbage rolls, my Mom's recipe for salmon patties, bouef bourginion, etc.) but even for things I make semi-regularly, meat loaf, stews, chili, I'm always on the hunt for the next, newest and more interesting take on it. There's still SO much out there to explore !

[Darienne]

I'm a fairly new 'cook' but I find I am still following my old patterns which are somewhat from the hip, I guess.

This morning I made a poppy seed coffee cake, putting together two recipes and making small loaf muffins instead of a cake. Then I made notes about what I did wrong and what I did right for next time. So I'm right there with the recipe...but working slightly out in space for one so lacking in knowledge.

The errors are teaching me big time!

[Chris Amirault]

Doesn't this change depend on how you define "following recipes"? Use exact ratios? Do every step exactly as written? I'd venture to guess that no one here follows any recipe to a T all the time. So perhaps the question is, where do you veer off when, inevitably, you do?

[nakji]

Substitutions. All over the place, as needed. Fortunately I have now been cooking long enough to know what makes a rational substitution and what doesn't.

[helenjp]

Definitely a "shoot from the hip" type, but if I refer to the source of a "favorite" recipe, what I find is very often not what I've been cooking for the past decade .

Another drawback is the way I go in phases, and then forget about things for years at a time.

Recipes = ideas...I have folders full of recipes that I have clipped and never looked at again. I'm sure that the process of clipping them commits the essential features to memory, though!

Two things that helped this quick-draw cook: memorizing basic baking proportions, and analyzing ingredient combinations in terms of flavor or texture...that made substitutions more fun and less risky. For example, pork and apples...sweet/floral plus sweet/funky. Banana would therefore work well in terms of flavor, but both pork and banana can be slimy...so I avoid stewing them together. That analysis shows me that banana and some of the sweet/funky fish like yellowtail (amberjack) go well together, especially because yellowtail can be dry.

[Darienne]

Another drawback is the way I go in phases, and then forget about things for years at a time.

Perhaps I could do it more easily because I am a newish 'cook', but I finally sat down and inputted a comprehensive list of the main dishes we eat under specific headings such as 'Mexican', 'Chinese', etc. It's on the refrigerator for consideration.

[Blether]

For years and years I was a strict recipe-follower - longer than most cooks ever are, I think. These days I'm overwhelmingly cooking 'from the hip', and more and more I enjoy picking out the best things on a visit to the market (or selecting from stores when I'm busy) and improvising something good from them.

Andiesenji, you reminded me that I like to cook classics from a recipe. As to voice memos and Word, did you ever try a program called ViaVoice, or similar ? Might save you some transcribing.

Helen, Buri & banana ?

[andiesenji]

For years and years I was a strict recipe-follower - longer than most cooks ever are, I think. These days I'm overwhelmingly cooking 'from the hip', and more and more I enjoy picking out the best things on a visit to the market (or selecting from stores when I'm busy) and improvising something good from them.

Andiesenji, you reminded me that I like to cook classics from a recipe. As to voice memos and Word, did you ever try a program called ViaVoice, or similar ? Might save you some transcribing.

Helen, Buri & banana ?

I have a speech to text app but I type faster than it and without errors.

[Jon Savage]

I generally cook straight from the hip depending on my mood and what ingredients catch my eye at the market and also what I have on hand at home.

I do use recipes when cooking "classic" dishes. Recipes are also particularly useful when confronted with an unfamiliar ingredient in my CSA box.