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While a cooking focus like baking is very much reliant on the right alchemy between carefully selected pre-set ingredients, more broad savory recipes are typically open to a chef’s interpretation. In fact, most recipes are meant only as a guide, and the best home chefs tend to be those who are willing to adjust cooking styles and flavor profiles as necessary. By comparison, chefs who stick too strictly to what a recipe’s telling them can often end up with imperfect or lackluster results that fail to hit the spot.
This can be frustrating, especially for people who prefer to do things by the rule book. A complete inability to adapt recipes as needed could even result in your calling yourself a ‘bad’ chef. The trouble is that, if you’ve never done it before, adapting a recipe can feel like approaching food blindly. To shine some spotlights on what you’re doing regardless, we’ve put together a fast-fire beginner’s guide to adapting recipes that finally lead to the results you’ve been searching for.
Image by Becca Tapert: CC0 License
Step 1: Build your basic skills
Often, recipe adaptations are based on your understanding of essential cooking skills and how they can improve taste overall. For instance, not all recipes will outline the need to continually stir a roux to stop it from becoming lumpy, but experienced chefs will do this anyway. Equally, some recipes may lack thickener, prompting experienced chefs to reach for additions like flour or cornstarch. In each instance, basic cooking skills come into play to help you perfect recipes without feeling like you’re lost the moment you step away from written guidance. Practice is perhaps the best way to ensure this fundamental skill set and can be overseen by the written section at the start of most recipe books. Equally, dedicated classes that focus on basic cooking skills can provide you with the strongest possible foundation for ensuring the best kitchen-based results moving forward.
Step 2: Find the best possible recipes
A good recipe will always be open to easy, taste-based adaptations that, in many instances, should even be outlined as a footnote to the recipe itself. With this in mind, finding great recipes is a large part of that battle when it comes to getting minor changes right. It’s certainly easy enough for even novice chefs to add key ingredients like carrots, potatoes, and so on to well-outlined options like this Mississippi pot roast recipe. By comparison, recipes that are entirely closed to interpretation, or that fail to touch on alternative cooking options which could lead to improved results, probably don’t deserve a place in your cooking file.
Step 3: Take tips from the best
All home cooks can learn a thing or two from the lessons of their parents or even just from the guidance of their favorite celebrity chefs. Seeing first-hand how other people adapt recipes as they go, often without even thinking about/noticing it can certainly provide a much-needed confidence boost if you’re just getting started here. Furthermore, paying close attention to somebody else’s cooking like this can help to develop those all-important basics and, perhaps even more importantly, an eye for things like great flavor combinations that could come to the rescue time and again. A cooking authority that you can always reach out to when you have emergency kitchen-based questions can be especially great for helping you to grow your understanding, and thus your ability to adapt as seamlessly as your cooking heroes in no time.
Image by Dan Gold: CC0 License
Step 4: Learn from your mistakes
Cooking is and always will be a practice of trial and error, and chefs who are brave enough to stand outside of recipe confines are especially likely to make their fair share of mistakes. That doesn’t matter and is often part of the course of good cooking. What is important is how you use the lessons within these mistakes to improve upon both your cooking itself and your approach to recipes overall. For instance, if one day you attempt to thicken your curry with cornstarch that ends up impacting flavor, you’ll be in a better position to test out suitable alternatives like tomato paste next time around. Over time, these small lessons will end up meaning that you’re far better able to take one glance at a recipe and understand what needs changing, and the best ways for you to do that.
Adapting recipes can be undeniably daunting, but when you get it right using tips like these, you’d be amazed at the taste sensations you can start creating.
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[…] who are more experienced with cooking should learn how to adapt recipes so that they can make delicious and unique dishes using the ingredients that they have on hand. […]