When faced with a pile of ingredients, do you go hunting for a recipe to match or do you rely on your own cooking knowledge to make a meal out of it? In the December issue of Food & Wine, former recipe addict Daniel Duane writes about his journey to becoming a more intuitive cook with the help of Thomas Keller, and boils the process down to five very practicable steps.
Duane, who taught himself to cook by working methodically through all 290 recipes in Chez Panisse Vegetables, realized at a certain point that his reliance on cookbooks was looked down upon by his professional-chef friends, but wasn't quite sure how to break the habit. Then he worked with Thomas Keller, who pointed out his own favorite type of recipe: free of precise measurements, open to experimentation and (to Duane) absolutely terrifying in its lack of explicit directions.
Keller believes this type of recipe allows the cook to make it her own, an idea which Duane finds striking.
As I understood it, he meant that a cook never quite absorbs a hyper-detailed recipe, always having to return to the book and its precise measurements. In that way, a cook never breaks a recipe addiction, never trusts himself to create.
According to Duane, the way to break away from precise recipes is to make them less precise, to create gaps which you fill in yourself. By relying on your own knowledge, you are less likely to need the recipes as reference until finally, after much practice, you don't need them at all. He distills the process to these 5 steps:
• Start with your all-time favorite recipe from your favorite cookbook. Cook it by the numbers, following every instruction.
• No more than three days later (so you don't forget too much), take out a piece of paper, write out the simplest version of the recipe that you believe you can work from and cook from that.
• A few days later, write an even less detailed version — a few sentences at most — and cook the dish again.
• Over the next few weeks, cook the dish entirely from memory at least several times, but make a small change each time (swap out a spice, change a vegetable), so that the recipe becomes a rough template, not a fixed set of rules.
• As you repeat the process with other recipes, experiment with skipping Step 1 and then, later still, Step 2.
• Read the article: Become an Intuitive Cook: Thomas Keller's Cooking Lessons
Have you ever tried anything like this? Do you have any tips for becoming a more intuitive cook?
Related: Fridge-Clearing Cooking Without a Recipe
(Image: Flickr member love janine licensed under Creative Commons)
How to Cook Moist & Tender Chicken Breasts Every Time
Make Chocolate Magic Shell Ice Cream Topping with Only 2 Ingredients
Our reading list
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Candy Stripe Teaspo...
Kitchen Transformation: Photos of a Step-by-Step Renovation Process
The Roeders' Modern Life is Beautiful 
Comments (15)
When I cook something from a recipe, I always read the recipe once and then just wing it. I find too many instructions to be bothersome... unless it is baking.
I have always found that the best skill is to know what things taste like, why they get put with other flavors, and what you like.
Once you can tell from reading a recipe what the flavor goal of it is, and how to modify it, you can start to improvise and create on your own.
I wonder what Keller's advice for intuitive baking is? That's not really a realm where you can improvise too much on proportion.
I'm a pretty intuitive cook but I do use cookbooks (I have a pretty large collection) as inspiration. I read cookbooks all the time and then adapt ideas for recipes I've seen to what I have in the house/what we like.
When it comes to baking, I only freestyle bread, since it has more flexibility than many baked goods.
I can understand the appeal of 'becoming an intuitive cook', but the part about the author being looked down upon by his chef-friends for relying on cookbooks is disturbing. It's a wonderful thing to have confidence in the kitchen and to be able to trust your instincts. But there is truly no shame in using cookbooks, nor should there be!
In an age where many, many people lack the basic skills, confidence and motivation to cook for themselves and their families on a daily basis - well, that's the bigger issue, in my book.
time to step off my soapbox now...
I have become an avid home cook in the past few years and have been able to master many difficult and complex recipes -- however, I always insist on following recipes to a T. My boyfriend is always bugging me to become the kind of cook who just wings it and throws some things together "intuitively," but I just can't do it. I guess it's partially my anal retentive personality and also an underlying insecurity that I might mess things up. In any case, I don't think there's anything too wrong with this approach, as long as you don't become overly rigid.
My mother started me out when I was about 12 with verbal instructions on making pot roast and I was experimenting from the start with different amounts of seasonings [and getting hollered at if I put pepper in the mix].
I've found that if you know a basic number of spice recipes, like garlic-goes-with-oregano-and-parmesan, you can pretty much be assured of being able to be intuitive about cooking. I consult cookbooks for amounts, like how many cups of liquid for cooking lentils, but from there it's add onion, because that's tasty, add some carrots for color, add a little bit of barley near the end for some different 'tooth', etc.
It helps to cook a variety of things rather than one recipe repetitively, I think, because then you get an idea of the things that work and the things that don't. For example, if you make rolled biscuits, try drop biscuits. Try adding cheese, or herbs, or chopped, dried fruits and some sugar [to make them more like scones]. The more experience you can come up with for a greater number of things, the easier intuitive cooking becomes because if you've cooked biscuits, scones are just fancied-up biscuits, and if you've cooked pot roast, cooking a pork shoulder for pulled pork is a piece of cake. Or pork shoulder.
My method is to read a whole bunch of recipes and look for the common features: those form the template.
It also helps to develop some basic fallback positions. If it can be roasted, it can be cut into smaller pieces and braised stove-top. If it can be done as pasta, it'll usually work as pizza. Most life problems can be solved by a small batch of muffins. All cookies-with-nuts-and-chips work with the same basic proportions. There are really only three or four types of cake, depending on the leavening and fat used, and you only need to master one.
The first thing I ever cooked, I altered the recipe (successfully), a fact my mom still finds hilarious.
I used to be a completely non-intuitive cook, following recipes to the letter. I don't think there's anything wrong with following recipes, and I think many people enjoy following them. My mom, for instance, insists I will ruin the spaghetti if I don't time it. Sigh. I, however, have a short attention span and a frustrating inability to read the entire recipe before either shopping for my ingredients or cooking the meal, which would often result in a botched meal with missing ingredients and steps (I'm infamous for picking a recipe that requires say, 24 hours of brining, and deciding I want it for dinner 2 hours from now).
I got so tired of messing things up that I decided I needed to know the bones of recipes and not rely so much on the minutia of the recipe. So, if I would decide I wanted Stroganoff, I would search the internet and my recipe books for every stroganoff recipe out there, and then get the gist of them, the ingredients that every single one seemed to need, and then I would set off. As a crutch I would use the simplest recipe to refer to but typically I would just try to remember it. And after doing that for a while I started coming up with my own meals that were actually edible and could even be called good!
Now, I just need to learn how to remember all the things I put in my on the fly meals so I get the same results every time. :)
that's the difference between cooking and baking. You can just pick a few complementary flavours and throw the stuff together and get something decent. With baking, if you miss one little thing it can be a complete disaster!
I was hoping that this was going to be for those of us who have a fridge full of condiments and super-basic ingredients but don't know what to make of any of it. I waste a lot of money on food.
IMHO, I think the first step is to cook or bake a variety of recipes first. A lot of them. This will give you a general idea of cooking and baking techniques and also how things end up tasting when you're done cooking and baking. I guess this does require some thinking and remembering while you are following step by step (as opposed to not remember what ingredients you put in it when eating or how you did something get it to the end product).
After that, you'll have the building blocks to come up with your own tweaks or cooking from scratch. And then you just need to courage to try doing that while knowing that you'll sometimes mess up. Then when something doesn't work out like you expect, figure out why and just that for the future.
I think this is probably the way most people are going to accomplish it since we can't all go to cooking school to have the basics drilled into us or cook the "same" thing repeatedly like described here (at least I would probably get bored of it).
A lot of the recipes that I create (and post, if they are good enough) are made this way. I start with an idea, and then I look up a few recipes. I glean the basics from those recipes and then go on, full speed ahead, with whatever ingredients and spices I prefer. I've been cooking since I was a child...the results tend to be pretty great!
This is a great, practical method though. Well done!
I really like this post, but I notice that a couple of the comments imply that you can't do this with baking--but you totally can.
I started cooking and baking at the same time, so moving from recipe-bound (utterly) to intuitive (relatively) hasn't been limited to one or the other. And I don't think the one-thing-wrong-and-it's-a-disaster chestnut holds much water, if I can mix metaphors. Adding the garlic with the onion and cooking on onion-heat is one tiny, small thing to do wrong, and one which I repeated many times before figuring out how fast garlic burns. Reactive ingredients in aluminum pans? Metal in a microwave (done it)? Forgetting to turn off a burner? Overboiling pasta?
I still follow the bones of baking recipes closely, since I haven't quite memorizes what makes different cakes different, but it's mostly about knowing what goes into the recipe and following that-- liquid, fat, flour, leaveners (or not)-- while you improvise. I'm not afraid of changing spices, adding or omitting fillers, switching sweeteners or using different liquid. And baking disasters are rarely more disastrous than burning something-- they almost always taste good with icecream, or toasted with butter!
It's funny to me that baking seems simultaneously more difficult/finicky/intimidating than cooking, and at the same time so much more feminine. You'd think the two stereotypes would cancel out.
That's all for my soapbox-- the moral of the story is to find a simple cake recipe and start experimenting! :D
This post is so relevant to my life right now--I enjoy cooking and have always been good at following recipes to the T, but up until a couple years ago if I was missing 1 ingredient, I wouldnt make the meal. I hated that and it took me reading recipe sites where people leave comments about what they did that I finally started to learn how to substitute and replace ingredients. Popular recipes with 350+ comments is a little overwhelming, but usually there is a common string of suggestions.
However, I agree with other posters about knowing "what goes with what to make this flavor" when it comes to herbs and spices. I'm still pretty lost in this concept. Just last night my husband brought home a jar of Adobo. The cooking directions: simple. But then it said "Flavor with seasonings to taste." WHAT! Totally lost. What are common Mexican Spices?? A google search helped, but overall I failed in seasoning the Adobo and dumped it down the drain.
A lot of it is experience. I love to come up with dishes based on whatever I have on hand, but I'm not sure I would have been as confident as a younger cook. I would encourage everyone to focus on techniques and flavor profiles rather than recipes. In fact, Mastering the Art of French Cooking basically outlines techniques that can then be applied to numerous dishes. And don't be afraid! My SIL paid me the best compliment; not only did she say I was good cook, but a fearless cook as well.
I like to follow recipes because I like variety. Recipes give me a guide to new things - I can cook Indian one week, then try out an Ethiopian dish the next week, then try something from China the next. I can cook in my "comfort zone" without a recipe, but for me, the fun of cooking is trying something I've never done before, and for that I prefer to have a recipe so I know where to start.