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DEL.ICIO.USDoes practice make recipes perfect?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When recently blogging about how to bake the “best” chocolate chip cookies, it made me wonder about the price of perfection.
Chefs spent multiple attempts reworking the classic Toll House chocolate chip to get it just right. Making these cookies required days of resting time and fancy expensive chocolate chips. The responses to the recipe showed that many readers were willing to take whatever extra steps were needed for perfection, while others were perfectly satisfied with the status quo.
It made me wonder how far you would go to perfect a recipe. You know how it is. Sometimes you make something that just isn’t quite right, but it’s not horrible either. When that happens to me, there are times when I go back and try to figure out what worked and what didn’t and remake it determined to iron out the kinks. But there are other times when I just throw in the towel and decisively “move on.”
How much effort do you put into perfecting a recipe? What makes you get back into the kitchen to give it one more try?
Comments
By Stan
September 5, 2008 3:26 PM | Link to this
Depends on who close the dish came to my food tastes. I made a greenbean dish the other day with GBs, cucumbers, onion, maters (only in the wifes) with lemon. The dish was so not to our liking that we will not make it again even to try to make it better to us. It just was not the kind of food we like.
If something is close then yeah, I’ll try it again with adjustments to try to make it better. I don’t really agree with perfection because my “perfect” is likely different from your “perfect”. So I just go for what I like.
By Becky
September 5, 2008 3:33 PM | Link to this
I don’t spend that much time on it..I hardly ever follow a recipe to a T, I always change something in it..If my family likes it, then I’ll cook it again..
The only thing that I’ve ever spent a lot of time trying to make just right, is biscuits..
By Stacey
September 5, 2008 4:53 PM | Link to this
I will often follow the recipe pretty closely the first time I make a dish but after that I like to see what I can do to improve it. Sometimes recipes will call for a particular brand and I may substitute a tried-and-true favorite or if the recipe calls for walnuts, I may use pecans instead. I’m more of a cook than a baker so experimenting for me is not that risky. In baking, recipes are more like a formula whereas in cooking, recipes are a blueprint.
By Kev
September 6, 2008 6:45 AM | Link to this
To me, a recipe is just a guide that I follow very loosely. Aside from baking, I rarely follow recipes.
By ncgreybr
September 7, 2008 1:31 PM | Link to this
I love Greek food. Years ago I tried a recipe for “Tuna Moussaka”. In the newspaper it had rave reviews. I served it to guests, we had one forkfull each and decided to go out to dinner. NO amount of playing with THAT recioe would have helped! Remember this TUNA MOUSSAKA!!
By dylan w/o the dead
September 8, 2008 4:11 AM | Link to this
I perfect everything in fact if the recipe is really awful I am always convinced its a mistake I made in the preparation of the dish so then I go back, usually in the next few days, and try it again using what I learned from the previous attempt to try and perfect the dish and technique required to make it.