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.
“Measure carefully, friends!” - Chef Jean Pierre on YouTube as he yeets in approximately random eyeballed quantities of everything.
Black bunny gang
Why yes, I do put a little cayenne pepper in my chicken soup. Why do you ask?
If it doesn’t clear my sinuses completely how is it supposed to cure me? Of course it needs cayenne.
Cayenne goes on everything
That’s Frank’s
Powdered spices specially, by the time you open the lid, you have already smelled it.
Don’t even need to try.
Can anyone explain what’s going on in the picture for me?
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.
I just grab whatever random spices I have that sound good and add a few shakes
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
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.
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.
“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…
If you aren’t cooking by vibe, are you really living?
Baking on the other hand…
With a deep enough knowledge of how baking works, it can be done. My sister improvises baked goods very well. The sad thing is that when one turns out amazing instead of just good, she can’t replicate it because she doesn’t know the recipe. I’m particularly sad I’ll never again have the amazing butter rum pound cake she made for her daughter’s birthday last year. She tried to make it again later, but it just wasn’t the same. :(
Powerful eldritch knowledge tends to come at a terrible price.
It requires more precision, sure, but there are absolutely bakers who can taste a dough and tweak the water/flour/oil etc. ratios to get the perfect bread.
It’s only different from other kinds of cooking because most people haven’t developed those senses. If you knew what you were doing, you could bake from scratch without a recipe easily and go by “vibes” (i.e. based on sensory input).
Baking is chemistry, cooking is jazz.
I have a Master’s Degree in chemistry, I can’t bake for shit. Cooking, on the other hand, I excel.
It’s biochemistry
Baking is actually ranching.
Yeast is closer to the animal kingdom than the plant kingdom. It’s a living organism you need to feed so it will grow your food. You need to make it comfortable and give it an environment to thrive and then kill it when it’s the yummiest.
Man, now I love making bread even more.
You can still get jazzy with it tho once you understand tha chemistry well enough.
Jazzy Chemistry sounds like the title of a textbook that is attempting to be more attractive to students.
Saxophone with little molecules floating up out of the horn end like notes, lol
Baking by vibe takes some work, and you should practice recipes by the letter before trying it, but it can be fun. It’s more so knowing the impact of what you’re adding.
Spices, for instance, can be added by vibe to some recipes. Flour, on the other hand, should be weighed out and a firm knowledge of ratio to fat rather then vibes.
I had to bake by vibes one time because I started a recipe then realized I didn’t have eggs and the friend the cake was for is lactose intolerant. Used a can of coconut milk. Turned into brownies instead of chocolate cake, but they were good enough that I’ve been intentionally making them since.
My wife says that everything I cook smells the same. Yeah baby I know what I like.
So like cooking, if you are making a recipe of something new it’s important to follow the recipe to know how it tastes then next time you know what to tweak to make it taste more like what you like
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
Fantastic.
You better get the hell out of my house immediately and never come back.
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.
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 don’t even measure my spices. Pure vibe. Mostly because recipes almost always feel like they don’t use enough of anything but salt.
