taste for next time
a cooking skillpost
uhhhh i’m a little nervous. more ppl read my last post than i expected. i must want ppl to read the stuff i write, that is the only explanation for my behavior, but a relatively small amount of attention made me nervous. wow!
i posted an ngl the other day & it was super fun, answering anonymous questions like a 2010 tumblr egirl. i got a few questions about cooking including this one.
well it made me think that either there are a few people interested in hearing what i have to say about cooking, or (even better) one dedicated person who really wants to hear what i have to say about cooking. so here you go
sorry for not starting a recipe blog. but in my opinion, recipes, while obviously the easiest way to share information about cooking, encourage a mode of thinking about cooking that is not optimal. i know tamar adler talks about this a lot in that “an everlasting meal” book which i have cruelly bullied several of you into reading so i won’;t go into it too much, go read “an everlasting meal” it’s better than anything i am going to say. but basically, recipes encourage you to think of cooking a meal as a discrete event instead of thinking of cooking as an ongoing process punctuated by regular meals. “cooking as an ongoing process” probably sounds like a bit of a drag if you don’t already like cooking, but actually it’s much more efficient & allows you to build skills that don’t even make sense to conceive of in the one-meal-at-a-time framework—for instance, tasting your cooking.
my guess is that you probably don’t taste your food enough while you’re cooking it, because most of the people i’ve cooked with don’t taste their food very much during the cooking process. i know i don’t taste my food often enough while i’m cooking it, & i’m actively trying to do so.
i think the one-meal-at-a-time paradigm is the reason people don’t taste their food while they’re cooking it. the first time you make a recipe, or even the first time you start tasting-while-you-go for a meal you have cooked often, tasting each step isn’t going to give you any actionable information *for this instance of cooking the recipe.* what’s the point of tasting the tomato sauce now when you know it will taste totally different after it cooks? say you think it’s undersalted & the garlic is too sharp now, so you add salt & then throw in some cream & a little sugar to tone down the garlic. well then the recipe calls for you to simmer the whole thing for half an hour & at the end the sauce is way too salty & there is no discernible garlic flavor.
but if you taste as you go the first time, then the next time you cook the recipe you know that “this level of sharp raw garlic flavor now” turns into “this level of rich, mellow cooked garlic flavor later,” “this level of undersalted now” turns into “this level of salted later,” etc etc etc. & knowing the connections between how it tastes at different stages & the end result, allows you to adjust the end result at different stages. this seems super obvious as i’m writing it out but ime most normal home cooks aren’t tasting at every stage so maybe it’s not obvious.
the practical upshot of this is that you should taste all of your food at every stage that it wouldn’t be dangerous to taste it—like, don’t taste your soup right after you add raw chicken to it, but do taste your green beans before & after cooking them, do taste your marinade before adding raw meat,
do taste all of your salad ingredients & your dressing separately & then after they’re mixed, do taste your tomato sauce before & after the half hour simmer. build up your embodied understanding of flavor and cause and effect, how temperature and/or time and/or combining ingredients, changes them.