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Chef's Table

To cook by rote is a recipe for mediocrity

By GUI ALINAT
Published May 25, 2005

In his new cookbook, Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavors, Food Network chef Tyler Florence doesn't list measurements for every ingredient. It's not a mistake.

He advocates counting "1 . . . 2 . . . 3" when pouring olive oil as opposed to measuring 3 tablespoons, which is what traditional cookbook authors want us to do.

Florence's method is interesting. After all, recipes never taught anyone how to cook. Think of the great cooks in your family. Do they focus on recipes, or rather seem to just "whip something up?"

The problem with recipes, as Florence explains, is that by focusing on measuring, we neglect the sensory elements of cooking. Aroma lets you know when a cake is done, touch tells you if grilled steak is rare or well done.

A recipe is a communication tool, not a training manual. My friend Bob, for instance, makes a great gumbo. If he had a written recipe for it (which he doesn't), I could reproduce Bob's gumbo, a legend in the Dunedin cul-de-sac where I live.

Assuming that Bob's description (or recipe) was accurate, a monkey could make it with almost as much success as Bob. But would the monkey have acquired more cooking skills than when it started? Did it learn to notice the peanut butter color of the finished roux or how the lack of sound when onions hit the skillet means the pan is not hot enough?

Cooking, unlike baking, is not an exact science. Too many croutons in your Caesar salad will unlikely ruin it. Rather, cooking is the flexible art of putting edible things together, according to your own specifications.

Until the early 1980s, training manuals for culinary students only included recipes. The idea was to teach as many recipes as one could possibly absorb, so that students could eventually reproduce them all with minimal failure. But the schools realized their cookie-cutter method of teaching shaped robots rather than artists.

Soon, technique came to be emphasized over recipe memorization.

This had a dramatic effect on chefs across the globe. They suddenly became empowered to break the conventional rules of classic cuisine and create. From this freedom came nouvelle cuisine, a fresher cuisine made by chefs for chefs, sometimes regardless of their client's own tasting experience.

Nouvelle at times was ridiculous, as it quickly escalated to extremes such as pairing fried brie with raspberry ice cream or placing three peas and a dot of sauce on a large, white square plate, wowing restaurant critics and food snobs alike.

Nevertheless, nouvelle cuisine was a good start to a new era, one in which chefs no longer copied, but instead created. Technique trumped recipes.

Most professional chefs know more than 200 techniques, but a home cook can get away with mastering these 10:

Peeling vegetables;

Using a chef's knife;

Dicing a vegetable, onion, or shallot;

Steaming;

Sauteing;

Making a roux;

Deglazing;

Making a soup;

Searing;

Reducing a sauce.

With these techniques, you can create many delicious dishes without recipes, and using whatever is in your refrigerator. Add a good book on culinary techniques to your cookbook collection. It will help unleash your inner chef and your cooking life will never be the same.

- Chef Gui Alinat welcomes questions about cooking and will respond to those of general interest in future columns. Sorry, he can't take phone calls or answer individual requests. Send questions to him in care of Taste, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or e-mail him at chefgui@chefgui.com Please include your name and city of residence.

[Last modified May 24, 2005, 09:27:03]