What the title said. Surely you don't just follow recipes, user?
So what's your last kitchen experiment? Did you make bread for the first time? Did you try a new technique or ingredient? Did you put your dick somewhere it hasn't/shouldn't have been put before?
Did it work or did you fail? How would you improve it next time? And what do you want your next experiment to be?
Tell me about your experiments, you fu/ck/ers.
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Pic related is my last experiment by the way. Putting red in a risotto. So I pureed some beets and stirred them through some risotto.
It's a little too brown to my taste. So now I'm looking for something else that retains its vibrant colour.
I tried activating almonds but it mad Sarin gas and wiped out my whole block.
One time I made something that I conceived in a dream that was basically very small meatball sized ground beef patties mixed with minced onion, ketchup, mustard, relish and egg and then dredged heavily in flour and deep fried and served with mayo dip. They were pretty good
TL;DR it looks like shit by the way those undercooked shrooms and garlic cloves are the most retarded fucking thing I've seen since dinotendies bags of cheez whiz
I made a fried chicken sandwich with pepperjack and Muenster cheese with ham and used an Everything bagel as the buns
>those undercooked shrooms
first thing I noticed. High heat for shrooms OP. You can't overcook chitin.
Being able to improvise is a skill in itself. For example jazz musicians use their knowledge and experience to just make up exciting music while they're playing. Classical musicians are much less good at this, if they can do it at all. Same is true for cooks. I would trust a resourceful, experienced cook to riff on a theme to good result. But someone just experimenting in the kitchen? No. I don't want to eat that, nor do I want to waste food like that in my own kitchen.
I agree they didn't get the sear I wanted. I threw in the rest of the ingredients too soon. They weren't undercooked, but I would have liked to have more of a sear though.
You never just try a combination you haven't tried before. Sometimes I'll try a new combination without exactly knowing what to expect. Sometimes it doesn't work out (and I'll still eat it), but sometimes it does.
How do you get to discover new things in the kitchen if you don't experiment? I don't just mean randomly slapping things together, but trying new techniques, tools, flavour combinations, etc?
Judging by that image, I think you should just stick to following recipes, OP:
Made baozi with a fesenjoon filling. It came out alright.
>How do you get to discover new things in the kitchen if you don't experiment?
Research. I'm not interested in trying to reinvent the wheel myself when I have access to the wisdom of other food traditions and great chefs. If I want to try new things I go out to eat. That's part of why I live in a major city. If I'm looking for inspiration I can go to a restaurant that specializes in a cuisine I'm unfamiliar with and check it out. Or if I'm feeling spendier I can check out what this or that famous chef is doing. There's a world's worth of inspiration a stone's throw from my door. I'd much rather explore that than aimlessly fuck around in my own kitchen. And if I don't feel like going out there's tons of inspiration online. I can research other food traditions or check recipes from great chefs. I've even found inspiration here, of all places. A while ago someone posted a webm, of making pav bhaji and now it's in regular rotation in my diet. I just had to look up how to make the masala. Why waste time mindlessly experimenting when I can be learning the wisdom of other cultures and great chefs?
Fair enough. I do that too. And part of what you describe is what I would count under experimenting. Trying new techniques for instance.
But I still like sometimes just fucking around. Guess I don't just want to rely solely on what others have done before me. I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything, but I am having fun.
I had a bunch of leftovers and made potato bacon soup that ended up insanely good. I actually drove some to my girlfriend and made her try it.
I'm not a 5* chef like Veeky Forums so a simple bacon/potato/dill/onion/parsley soup turning out to be one of the best things I've tasted when I winged it with leftovers made me really happy.
I guess it's different ways of looking at the same thing. My point is that I'm not going to cook completely off the cuff by whim. I did that back when I first started cooking and had to eat a lot of awful misfires of dishes because I was trying to be creative when I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. But I never follow a recipe, either. I just look up a bunch of examples of what a dish is supposed to be until I have a handle on it, and them go from there. If I want to be creative I'll pick up a guitar. In the kitchen all I want to do is turn out a variety of good meals so I can eat well without spending a fuckton of money.
>Surely you don't just follow recipes, user?
>Did you make bread for the first time?
Seriously, faggot?
In a sea of faggots, OP is a Great White shark.
We're not so different you and I.
What you just described (the whole 'not working from recipes, but from example and putting a spin on it the next time' is the basis of my approach too. That's what would call one way of experimenting. And I get not wanting to fuck around when that is how you feel about food. But I don't mind eating the occasional shitty meal if it means I discover some new tricks all on my own. Makes it feel more rewarding and it's fun.
I ate enough shitty meals while I was learning to cook. Fortunately my standards were lower back then. But I'm an oldfag, so I've eaten a lot of amazing foods over the years. Very often it's little more than a matter of showing off good ingredients simply. But if I'm shelling out for good ingredients I want to treat them with respect. And treat myself with respect, because I have to eat the results. I'm happy to be more conservative in the kitchen if it means I'm a pretty consistently decent home cook. My wife appreciates that, too.
With cooking it really is a matter of taste. Maybe in some years that'll be me too. Maybe when I have a family to feed. Or maybe I'll keep combining the two styles. Who knows.
Thanks for the discussion.
>Experimenting before you have a proper appreciation for flavor and technique
Experimenting isn't supposed to be mere trial and error, lads.
I think we both stated we work from existing knowledge and experience. I agree it isn't mere trial and error, but the keyword here is 'mere'. Trial and error have their place in trying new things. That's where a lot of the fun of cooking comes from for me.
"Experimenting"
>Baked beans with sliced carrots
>Undercooked mushrooms
>Whole garlic
>Beanshoots
That's not a meal user
Good point. But once you know how to cook it becomes more like the jazz vs. classical musician analogy I used. Some cooks are more jazz - they may be cooking a particular dish, but they enjoy improvising around it. I'm more classical. I'm of the opinion dishes become popular or classic for a reason. I'm looking to get a handle on what makes a particular dish a classic and recreate that in my kitchen. It will be my interpretation of it, but I'm not interested in veering too far from the basic concept because I'm not particularly interest in expressing creativity in my cooking. I'm looking for delicious, economical and reasonably healthy. I'm not one of those guys who asks himself, "Why not?" in the kitchen. I prefer to cook within an established structure. This doesn't get boring for me because there so many good established cuisines out there to learn.
There's no beans in the dish and the garlic tasted great this way. I really enjoyed taking bites with and without the strong taste of garlic. The meal worked both ways. The flavour wasn't really the experiment. It worked fine with the vegetable stock and white wine. I definitely need to sear the mushrooms better next time, but the flavours were fine.
The real experiment was getting a vivid red colouring in the dish and it didn't work as intended.
Does anybody know of a way of preserving a beet's strong colour or of another way of getting a nice red into a risotto?
>another way of getting a nice red into a risotto?
OK Mr Experimenter. Let the more classical guy offer a little inspiration: There's a South Indian dish called tomato rice. It's a common breakfast dish in that cuisine. The flavors are fun because you have things like mustard seeds, ginger, curry leaves, chilies and turmeric adding some interest to a dish that's pretty much just rice and tomatoes with a little cashews and peanuts thrown in. If you want to get creative you could use that as a template for a risotto. It'll end up red-orange. But it would give you the fun of creating an Italian-Indian fusion dish. And because it'd be based on a classic dish where the flavors have already been worked out it's very likely to end up tasting good.
Personally I'd make tomato rice OR a classic risotto, but you like to experiment and try new things. Bet you've never used curry leaves before. Have at it!
That sounds like an interesting take. And you're right, I've never used those before. That's going on the shopping list. Thanks!
i personally don't like the flavor of beets, but if i were you, i'd say maybe puree and then strain to collect the color and some of the nutrients without altering the target texture.
So you don't end up buying a bunch of ingredients for just one dish do a little research on South Indian cooking. You can find plenty of interesting things to make to use up the extra curry leaves and the like. You've never made a tarka before, and it's a useful thing to know. As a finishing move it can turn a lot of otherwise simple dishes into powerfully delicious foods.
My favorite chef always says two things
>recipes are a guideline unless it's desserts
>knorr just gives you a flavor salt and pepper cant
2)
Made some white chili with chicken and Great Northern beans. I was amazed at how good it was.
i think my last experiment was smoking brisket. the experiment part came from the fact that i couldn't find any brisket in the local grocery store so i used corned beef. looking back, if i patted it dry, put on a strong rub, and THEN smoked it, i might have accidentally discovered pastrami all on my own. my result was just passable
I made a dish with pickled beef. It turned out really tasty.
Girlfriend wanted cookies, but we are broke, so I whipped up some peanut butter and cinnamon cookies using what ingredients we had. They actually came out great considering I'm not great at baking.
love tham noodless
Today I made mushy peas.
I'm an American, so mushy peas was never something I'd had before but heard about it from English cuisine and so we decided to do up mushy peas with baked cod and dill potatoes.
They were fucking amazing with no effort and wtf I fucking love mushy peas now.
made a salmon dessert
I made chinese dumplings for the first time with ground chicken instead of pork. Turned out pretty decent, though I could have seasoned the meat more. I boiled some, fried some (but accidentally ended up burning them like a dumbass), and froze the rest for later.
This weekend, I'm looking at trying to make mapo tofu, or at the very least my own pizza. More likely than not I'll just make a big stew because I'm lazy and need food to eat over the week.
Beet chips, pomegrantate, whipped goat cheese, pineapple sage (one of my fav flowers btw), pecan?
Whats the puree
smoked almond, roasted garlic oil, goat cheese, black garlic, pomegranate, pineapple sage, beet chips and beet mousse whipped with balsamic.
>I wonder what happens if I add yoghurt to scrambled eggs
>Huh, this random food blog says it'll get real creamy, let's try that
Turned out unpleasantly watery, with the yoghurt muting the flavour of the eggs.
Did a risotto for the first time the other night actually, along with trying a lamb steak seared then braised in cream and red wine sauce with veggies. Risotto came out well but took longer than expected to finish on stove top so between that and reducing my braising liquid to make a sauce, the lamb steak was out of the heat for too long and just didn't cook how I wanted it to to begin with.
The veggies were additionally mushy and without texture after cooking in the braising liquid but I foresaw that.
Lastly, the wine I paired was far too fruity(only wine I had on hand) so doing this to begin with was probably a mistake.
tl;dr average risotto for a first-timer but every other aspect of the meal needed an overhaul. Other person dining didn't think it was bad but I know it could have been much better. Was his first time eating lamb as well. The texture of it was shot and the flavor was overpowered by the overly sweet sauce. I need to do it justice some time because I robbed him of a good first experience.
I've had times where experimenting goes really well, this just wasn't one of those times. I learned a lot though so I'm less likely to make those same mistakes.
>tried to make pea+ham soup with a smoked ham hock
>left in crockpot on low for 6 hours since I couldn't fit the ham bone into saucepan where I did the initial cooking
>the resulting soup is both thick and so goddamn smokey that it's difficult to eat since the flavour is overpowering
>I have 3kg left of this stuff to eat
How do I improve this Veeky Forums? I added water to some of it today and it improved the density but didn't do anything about the smoke flavour which is so prevalent - guessing it's because I cut up and put in the ham hock skin and all
take the frozen ones, steam them real quick, then fry them.
here's a great ma po tofu recipe: thewoksoflife.com
gl on the pizza, it's fun to do from scratch