Recipes? We don't need no stinkin' recipes

Personally, I almost never follow recipes. Yeah, sure, you have to when you’re baking a cake. But I don’t bake cakes, so there. That said, I love cookbooks. I love the ideas I  get and I love learning about different ingredients and mixing and matching them and coming up with new menu ideas, new techniques and wicked combinations.

The problem with recipes is that you don’t really get an understanding of how and why something tastes good – you simply get a blueprint to follow. There’s no learning, just imitation. But what if you want to be an architect? What if you want to make your own blueprints?

It always seemed to me someone should make a cookbook that talks about simply that: here is what bread (or riboletta or chicken paprikash) is, how it works, now go figure out how you want to it. Isn’t it true that all these items are as different as the people who make them?

What I’ve discovered is that there are a few great cookbooks out there who celebrate flavor and technique – and not recipes:

1. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is a book that came out last year by author Michael Ruhlman. In it he describes just that: the ratios of different types of foods. Bread? 5 parts flour, 3 parts water. You get the idea. He discusses doughs, stocks, sauces, sausages and custards.
2. The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs is simple a resource on flavors and ingredients. What work together according to some serious chefs.  Think of it this way: you have some halibut, you look it up, it tells you ideas of what might work with it, both as complementary dishes and seasonings.
3. Culinary Artistry (Roughcut) is similar to the flavor bible in that it discusses the processes of composing flavors and crafting fine dishes, though it is meant to be a sort of snapshot of the culinary trends of the time (mid-90s), it is classic in many ways that hold today (it’s not that long ago…).
4. Cooking Beyond Measure: How to Eat Well without Formal Recipes is more like a recipe book, as it deals with specific dishes, but it doesn’t have strict formulas and reminds cooks to rely on one’s taste when formulating foods.
5. How to Break an Egg: 1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substitutions, and Handy Techniques is basically a compendium of cooking techniques and an excellent substitution to figure out how to finish your cake if your (gulp) out of eggs…and time to go to the store.

Happy cooking…

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