Last night, I cooked steamed rice teriyaki salmon and stirred fried ginger celery with a sweet chili sauce.
I've cooked rice my entire life. I have the process memorized. When you steam rice, the amount of water and rice is pretty forgiving, so you don't have to be too careful. The salmon was pretty straightforward. I seared both sides of the filet. I took it off the heat, put some teriyaki sauce on top, and covered it so it could finish cooking. The celery I chopped up, stir-fried with ginger. I ate a piece of celery while cooking and when it started having the texture of a pickle, I took it off the heat, put in a sweet chili sauce, and it was done. There didn't feel like any need to look up any directions.
When I bake desserts or bread, I always use recipes. The chemistry is tricky, and too much one ingredient can mess up the dish. Also, you can't make adjustments when you bake. When you cook a soup, if you don't have enough salt, you can taste it while it's cooking and make adjustments. You can't do that when you make a cake. You don't find out until the end if everything was in balance.
Here's the thing, I actually really like reading cookbooks and recipes. It's a great way to get ideas and learn about the process of cooking. However, I find that cooking with a recipe in front of you distracts from cooking. There's the anxiety of getting a recipe right, which is very real and not always productive. The best recipes cannot account for all variations in ingredients and kitchen tools. So yes, following the recipes help, but it's reacting to what is happening that makes cooking most successful.
How do I know how to cook a dish with recipes?
Some of it is practice. If you cook the same dish enough times, you will memorize it. Even something like banana bread that needs precise measurement, I've cooked it enough times to have the recipe memorized. Most things don't really have that many ingredients. A good marinara sauce, or a meatball, only has three or four ingredients. So it's not a lot to memorize.
Part of it is getting comfortable with techniques and then using them with different variations. For example, if you know how to cook a chicken in a pan, searing both sides, turning the heat down, and covering it to finish, then you know how to cook a piece of fish or a steak. If you know how to saute string beans, you can saute broccoli. Every time you acquire a technique, you have new possibilities to explore.
The last thing that helps is knowing what you want to do and what you can do. Quiet your mind, let your imagination guide you, and then interact with the ingredients and tools in front of you. Taste often, try new things, and know what mistakes will happen, but they aren't that big deal. Give yourself time to learn. For example, I wanted to learn how to make gumbo. So I watched a bunch of videos and read a bunch of ingredients until I found one I liked:
I watched this video twenty or thirty times over the course of a week, and then I went for it. His recipe isn't perfect, and there are things that I've changed. It's like listening to a song enough that you know all the lyrics by memory. Sometimes it happens without you thinking about it; other times, it takes effort to know the words. That's how learning recipes go, and only by really taking the time to learn and understand recipes do you learn how to cook something.
Recipes are great, but try to get away from them. They are only a framework to build off of, not a cage to hold you in. The knowledge you learn from recipes will give you more freedom to be creative.
Most of all, when you cook, trust yourself. Let cooking be an adventure, and don't forget sometimes it's fun to get lost.
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