It’s funny that smelling the spices and the food as I cook it to see if they’ll go well together is my main method of figuring out which spices to use.
It’s the only way to season food. If you’re good enough, you can just imagine the flavors, but I still have to rummage the spice cabinet and sniff to get the dish to taste just right.
I don’t even sniff them; I just remember how they taste/smell, and then I end up adding vanilla extract to savoury dishes and it tastes amazing
You better get the hell out of my house immediately and never come back.
Fantastic.
Critical is that HOW you learn this is trial and error.
Most people can imagine the result of combining two images, say a frog riding a turtle. We can imagine what a handful of wet spaghetti might sound like being dropped onto the hood of a car. We can imagine what a fluffy bunny that’s been rolling in sand might feel like.
But that isn’t just because those senses are somehow intrinsically better for synthesis and prediction. We just got a ton more practice with them. As kids we got to draw, we got to play with toys, we touched everything, we bashed all kinds of stuff together.
But most of us, we just got the food prepared for us with no awareness of the properties of the constituent ingredients.
You gotta act like a toddler in the kitchen to grow that part of your brain.
I binge watched a lot of Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares (the UK) one
The best tip ever given on those shows is Gordon Ramsay yelling “taste taste taste!” at everyone.
Tasting as you go is what improved my cooking the most. I also vigorously smell everything too.
I don’t even measure my spices. Pure vibe. Mostly because recipes almost always feel like they don’t use enough of anything but salt.
You just know that bunny fucks
Might even be famous for it.
Considering the majority of flavours we experience are in fact smells, if you can cook by your nose you’re usually pretty safe on how the end result will come out.
I’m not a foodie nor a chef but I’ve been able to break apart and reproduce restaurant dishes just by smelling.
“Can you share the recipe?”
“Nope!”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, I don’t remember.”
for me it’s easy because i mostly remember what i just made. but that’s also because i pay special attention to what i do and what comes out afterwards, kinda to do semi-structured research.
Some people would definitely not remember all the details, but yeah, this might not be an issue for others.
…that’s pretty much my improvisational style, everything eyeballed, nothing measured: sometimes things turn out amazing but of course the cost of those happy surprises is that i’ll never make it the same way again; couldn’t if i tried…
…i dated a girl who dogmatically followed published recipes, considered any deviations anathema to the authors’ labor developing them, and she was horrified to watch me cook…
You guys don’t cook by smell?
“Measure carefully, friends!” - Chef Jean Pierre on YouTube as he yeets in approximately random eyeballed quantities of everything.
I cook by vibe mostly because I don’t have the items the recipe calls for. So I typically substitute whatever I have that I think fits or smells right. Works well 9/10, just when someone asks me what I used to make something, I have no fucking clue.
My chef yells at me because I do this all the time.
Though he’s mainly mad because I didn’t measure a single fuckin thing and can’t recreate it
can’t recreate it
This is the main downside IMO
also, if you do write down the recipe and try to recreate it on another day, it doesn’t work because your mood has changed and now the flavor doesn’t match anymore.
has happened to me many times now.
If your chef has a nose and taste buds he should be able to figure it out by remaking it a few times.
It’s not that he can’t recreate it, it’s that my coworkers can’t.
That sounds like you are making yourself indispensable.
Either of the “as directed” users are just cowards with no taste buds.
Isn’t this just a sign of inexperience? If you have been cooking for a reasonable time, you will know which spices to use when going for what sort of flavour.
yeah but there’s also a lot of people just seeing cooking as a chore and never really paying attention to it, therefore not learning much or anything at all.
it takes patience and a bit of dedication to actually learn cooking in a reasonable way. otherwise you’re just following recipe.
I just follow my family’s habit , add reasonable amount
Black bunny gang
