I'm not offering a tip, but I'll take a stab at clarifying what others are asking: Which flavors go well together? What complements the delicate flavor of sole? What goes well with the strong flavor of beef? Which herbs and spices are good partners?

The more I cook from recipes and understand the whys/hows of the cooking techniques, I gain more confidence in making stuff up.

For me improvisation is about confidently making substitutions for ingredients or deciding to eliminate ingredients I don't have. That said, I probably improvise with recipes on hand (either on paper on in the back of my head). I'll refer to a recipe for proportions of ingredient amounts.

I suppose mise-en-place becomes a little more important when improvising...laying out all the ingredients that you intend to use and comparing it to a base-recipe to make sure I didn't forget some completely crucial step/flavor.

I improvise a lot, particularly because of the weekly vegetable delivery we get. Yesterday, I made a soup with carrots, vegetable broth, sugar snap peas, sweet onions, and ginger.

A good way to start improvising is to come up with some salads. It's hard to go too wrong with them. I don't eat meat, so I don't have any helpful advice on improvising meat dishes.

Also, reading cookbooks is a good idea. I love to get cookbooks from the library and flip through them, just to get ideas of what sounds good to me.

What JenPDX said.

Basic rule: if it smells good together, it'll probably taste good together.

I often use a recipe I'm familiar with as a starting point and you can rarely go wrong with stir-fry for using up veggies. My mother's recipe for spagetti sauce is "ground beef, browned, 4 cans of tomato sauce and any spices that smell Italian." Just keep working at it. I've been cooking for myself for about 7 years now and I'm still not always comfortable with improvising. Sometimes, though, you're forced to.

I recently was making a beef stew somewhat based on beef burgandy so I was going to add red wine. I had gotten home from the grocery store with a four pack of those little bottles of wine, some veggies and a fresh bottle of seseme oil. The groceries weren't all put away but what the heck, right? If I wanted to eat in the next 2 hours I needed to get dinner started. My phone rang so I worked as I talked to my mom until I was ready to add the wine. Not really paying attention, I picked up the nearest small bottle, tore the plastic off and poured it in. Huh. That's odd. That didn't sizzle like wine going into a hot pan... And I looked at the bottle in my hand.

I had just poured ALL of the seseme oil in! So I poured the meat and veg and oil out into a colandar (bye bye pan juices!) and set about trying to fix it. I added the red wine anyway, hoping to hide the flavor of sesame but it didn't work so I embraced the mistake and asked myself, what flavors do I like with beef and sesame? A generous dose of ginger and some soy sauce later, my dinner guests were giving me compliments on the stew.

Moral of the story? You can fix a lot if you just don't panic and if you remember liking the flavor combination in a restaurant, it'll probably taste good at home, too.

(Sorry for the long comment, but I HAD to share)

One more comment, I don't cook from extremely complicated recipes to start with (90% of the time).

Look for short ingredient lists, one-pan/pot recipes where you continually add stuff as opposed to preparing different parts of the recipe to combine the parts at the end relying on chemistry and timing to make things look good and taste good.

So if you become very familiar with recipes that are quite simple and straightforward - you can add stuff or substitute stuff quite easily.

i have just recently begun to improvise when i cook. it's really in the baby steps stage right now. for example i made boiled potatoes with leeks the other night completely on my own. i didn't look at a recipe at all. i had done enough cooking to kind of know what flavors i like and what i thought tasted good together and it came out great!
not a complicated dish, but it was still successful and has helped me build my confidence. maybe the next dish will be a little more complex.

http://threadtrace.wordpress.com

I'm certainly not a chef but really truly my rule of thumb is "If I like it alone, try it together". Occasionally, this doesn't work out (I love bacon, capers and green onions, but that doesn't mean... well, actually those three taste great together).

But isn't finding the right "What goes with what" about knowing your own palate? Someone may like thyme with the delicate taste of sole, but I might prefer zaartar.

Knowing your own palate is especially true because if I were to give advice about taste and pairing, I'd suggest cilantro with just about anything, and I KNOW how many people hate cilantro!!!

I suppose it's a matter of "practice makes perfect"

I love my cookbooks but it's rare for me to actually follow a recipe to the letter, unless I'm making something very new to me. Cookbooks are great for inspiration and reference, so I'm often looking through them as I plan menus, but then the actual cooking is more or less from the hip.

Baking, of course, is a different story but even there I'm slowly slowly experimenting with what can be substituted or tweaked without ending up with a puddle or a brick.

So I say if you want to become a better freestyle cook, pay attention to recipes! They will teach you how things work.

I never use a recipe when I cook. It's all practice and seeing what works and what doesn't. I find reading food histories and memoirs help more than you'd think, especially when trying to figure out what that taste is that seperates what you made from what you get at a restuarant. Read some food science type books too, to understand what oils/fats/spices work well under what conditions and how simple things like baking work.

My biggest fear of cooking on the fly is that of coming up with something inedible. Of course, the irony is that I buy things I think I would like to eat, but put off cooking them for fear of not being able to eat the end result, and end up not being able to eat them anyway because they've gone south in the meantime.

I'm okay with making substitutions in recipes, but have a hard time working with food completely on my own.

I only use recipes for special cooking days, or to try to learn something new. For day-to-day cooking, I improvise all the time. Getting to the point where I can improvise well has taken a long time, but some things make improvisation simpler. First, focus on one or two cuisines you really like. If you tend to like, say Cajun/Creole, or Mexican, or Italian, you can stock up and have the essential pantry items and spices and things on hand for that cuisine. If you're all over the map, making Asian stirfry one night, French-style beef stew the next, and a tamales day three, you'll never be able to keep everything you need in the house. You'll also never learn the techniques for that particular cuisine. Focus!

And in order to do so, find recipes in books, not magazines. Magazines are fine, they can be wonderful, but there's a certain short-attention-span thing going on. A good, serious cookbook will offer deeper information about technique than most mags . (Exception: Cooks Illustrated - great for a beginner, if a little grating for a more experienced cook).

Then, read recipes. Don't just say "here's this recipe for jambalaya, I'm going to make that." Look at two or three or ten recipes for jambalaya. And you'll start to notice patterns - the roux needs to be cooked well, onions and green peppers and celery form the base along with a spice blend, meats are added at one point, shellfish at another. Basically, the structure remains the same, even if the proportion of white pepper to cayenne, or of onions to celery varies a bit. And you'll start to see how much leeway you have.

You could do worse than picking ten or twelve good basic recipes with a lot of variations - quiche, vegetable soup, stewed chicken, etc. - and really learning how these dishes work. Because once you can make a spinach quiche, you can make an asparagus and ham quiche or a tomato and leek quiche and so on.You won't need a recipe. (Some of the older basic general cookbooks, like Fannie Farmer, were great about this. A basic muffin recipe would be followed by seventeen variations. Nowadays, the trendy things is to offer seventeen different recipes that vary only slightly in structure as if they were totally different - because one uses almond extract and raspberries while the other uses blueberries and a little cornmeal. But the underlying recipe is the same. Learn from the old girls, they knew.)

as most all have stated above, cooking is much more of an improvisational art than baking. pyewacket is right on with looking at a few versions of recipes before making a dish - i was looking for an african groundnut stew recipe one time and no two were exactly alike, so i took the parts i liked out of each and amalgamated them and had a great stew.

baking i feel is more of a science i feel, as watching alton brown every time affirms. i once put too much sugar in a cake i was trying to make and it never got past soupy -- this is why i am always very careful with following baking recipes to the letter.

but i agree, the way to start is by learning what basic flavors go together.

In a way, my cooking is half recipes and half improvisation. I use a lot of "standard recipes" like slurries, roux, bechamel sauces, red sauces, etc., in improv recipes. Knowing those fundamentals helps with the improv later. When friends tell me about made-up dishes that didn't work out, it was often because one of those fundamentals went wrong (like adding cornstarch to hot liquid to thicken it--whoops!). Even becoming comfortable with fundamental cooking techniques--grilling, sauteing, steaming, poaching, braising--has been integral. Then, you can make like a mad lib or fashion plate toy (where you randomly mix and match outfits and making rubbings? remember those?). A lot of the improv aspects comes with using what's in season and combining it with what's already in my pantry. "Oh, asparagus is on sale, and I have chicken in the freezer--how about seasoning with some of the rosemary in the garden?" Or making a nice asparagus risotto with baked chicken? Or asparagus and chicken stir fry? Or both in a spring roll? Or on a white pizza? Or with pasta???

I am just starting to be comfortable enough with cooking to improvise a little bit here and there. That came after following a lot of recipes and, as another person already said, really paying attention and making a lot of mental notes about what flavors go well together, the purpose of certain ingredients, etc. Also, having cookbooks that actually do more than give you recipes, books that explain the hows and whys, has helped tremendously.

I'm going to have to agree with what a lot of people said about improvising when cooking. I usually look up recipes if I have a few ingredients I want to use together but am not quite sure what I want to do with and I need some inspiration. Then from there I'll change things around based upon what I I like or what I have. Usually creating something totally different. If you don't know how much of this or that to add, add a little at a time. Better to add a pinch of salt than a tbsp. at a time ;)

As for baking, I love baking. Honestly you just have to practice. My aunt likes to measure everything perfectly, and I mean perfect. I'll measure out very few things "perfectly" but not some things, I know that if the recipe has 4 cups of flour, being short or over a few granules won't hurt (hehehe). As for substituting though, that's a lot harder than cooking. I like to bake cookies, cupcakes, bars, etc. so I will substitute things like different nuts, type of chocolate, fruits, etc. It really just all depends on what you are making, but it is obviously more technical than most things you'll cook.

I was a religious recipe-follower for a long time--my personality type is not prone to improvisation, and recipes were a really important crutch as I was learning to cook.

Still, I now cook most weeknight meals without following a recipe. Part of this is a function of confidence in the kitchen that only comes with practice; part is the result of having read tons of cookbooks and food magazines over the years, to the point that I've started to see how similar so many recipes are.

As with OneWallKitchen above, my comfort with improvisation increased exponentially when I made a commitment to cooking with fresh, in-season ingredients. And, of course, a few nights when the cupboard was near-empty forced some improvisation as well.

When I was a kid I would bang out recipes from my mom's cookbooks or from cooking shows (Yan, Frugal Gourmet, Martha, etc.)

The idea of preparing a meal without a recipe was so intimidating to me. But I was confident that there would be a day when I could cook without a recipe.

I'm a professional chef now, so I don't use recipes all the time.

But that time, when I felt like I couldn't cook without a recipe was part of the growing process.

Trying and failing and beginning to learn how things work when you combine them is like learning how to ride a bike.

When you become comfortable cooking without a recipe, it's like that feeling when you kick the training wheels off.

It's all about learning the "formulas". This combined with that and that equals this! When I've got fresh rosemary I'll substitute for this and it will equal that!

One good thing to do is keep tabs on what you like when you eat out. If there's a flavor I like in something and can't place what it is, I ask. That way I can try and replicate that at home.

I also rarely use recipes except for baking. I'll look at recipes for times and temperatures and ingredient suggestions, but I usually use them as guidelines more than rules.

Salads are a good place to start, as are soups. Pastas too. Start with a comfortable base, and then add to that. I made all sorts of salad dressings as a kid- some were awful, but I learned what did and didn't work together that way.

It's hard to explain what goes together and why... it's kind-of something that becomes intuition.

On the flip-side. Sometimes I improvise so much on a recipe that I know by heart (theoretically). And for some reason the outcome isn't so great. Then I go back and follow the recipe to the letter...

Improvising is something that you can take baby steps towards. One easy thing to do is start being a bit more slapdash about how you follow a recipe. Use something different when you don't have a specific ingredient on hand, change the flavouring, add something, just modify the recipe a little bit. Pretty soon, you'll start to think of a recipe as inspiration or just a place to start.

To train yourself to figure out what "goes together", become familiar with all your pantry flavourings. Smell and taste your spices and herbs and sauces. Notice which things are frequently put together in recipes. Try those same combinations on different base ingredients.

Don't worry too much about "ruining" a dish. It's really hard to make something completely inedible. And if you manage to, it makes a funny story later.

Everyone says you can't improvise in baking... it's not true. But the place to improvise is with the flavouring. Add crystalized ginger to those chocolate cookies, add herbs to that bread dough, use orange blossom water instead of almond extract... but don't change the balance of dry to wet ingredients or modify the basics like flour, fat, sugar, salt, or leavener, without some care.

(Note: I have a banana muffin recipe that I've dropped the 1/4 c of butter from successfully, but I started by just using a few tablespoons, then 1 tablespoon, then none).

You can do it, you can improvise---because that's what cooking is about, knowing technique and having common sense so that you can adapt to your taste. Focus on styles/approaches that you like, and trust yourself. It's not rocket science once you figure out how to handle yourself in the kitchen.

I think a lot of knowing what you can just throw together comes from experience. After making X number of Italian dishes, Spanish dishes, Thai dishes, etc, you get a feel for what herbs/oils/spices/meats/veggies/cheeses go well together for that type of dish. So long as you stay within that formula you'll get something that tastes Italian, Spanish, Thai, etc.

It also helps to really familiarize yourself with the flavor of different herbs and spices. Take just a bit of spice maybe 1 or 2 each day and smell and taste a tiny amount and write down what your thoughts are about that spice: taste, things you think it would taste good with, try a bit with bread, or on a small piece of plain chicken. Don't test too many new herbs at a time, they'll start to influence the flavor of the herbs that come after it. If you like it, find a dish where it's the primary flavor and try it. The memory of what it tastes like will become more ingrained the more you use it.

Don't be afraid to be a dump cook, making rice, think one of the spices or herbs you like would work in it? Try it out. What's the worst that can happen?

I tend to make my tried and true dishes for company, but when cooking for me, I experiment.

The best way to learn how to cook without recipes is to buy great cookbooks and think about why and how the recipes work. I've been reading cookbooks recreationally since I was about 12 (hey, I was an odd kid, and my mother was a terrible cook).

Read enough, and you just sort of pick up what works. You get a template of how, say, roasting vegetables or steaming fish works, and you also realize that the precise amounts and temperatures and times and ingredients can vary a lot and still taste amazing. You realize that some things have to get watched or they'll burn and that others can sit and caramelize in the oven an extra 20 minutes and still be pretty damn good. Cooking starts making sense to you as a creative dialogue, a back-and-forth between you and what you're making. And you enjoy it a lot more.

Now I google for things like cooking times and temperatures when it's something unusual, but otherwise only use recipes either as a something to improvise from. Pretty much the only time I follow recipes strictly is when it's in an unfamiliar cuisine or uses an unfamiliar technique (especially when baking!).

Of course, this is for everyday stuff. There are always those moments you get suckered in by your French Laundry cookbook and think that you, too, must make your own butter-poached lobster. Those are days when unless you're Thomas Keller I don't recommend improvising!

I am not much for recipes, but love to know how to combine flavors. The book I use as a reference for combining ingredients is called "Culinary Artistry" by Andrew Dornenberg and Karen Page. It is my goto book when I have ingredients that are inspiring me, but am not sure what spices or other ingredients might complement the dish/meal.

Soups and pasta sauces are where I've started improvising. One of the cookbooks I go to again and again is "The Moosewood Daily Special", which is nothing but soups and salads; I quickly noticed that a lot of the Moosewood soup recipes generally follow a pretty simple formula (Step 1. - pick a stock, step 2. - cram as many different vegetables into that stock as you can), so I've been starting to play in that regard.

Soups generally tend to be pretty forgiving when it comes to improvising, too.