Experimentation, rebellion, and ginger molasses cookies
Working at a cooking school that emphasizes “no recipe/follow your inner chef-style cooking” and going to professional culinary school classes has me fascinated by the ways recipes are developed and written. I don’t know where we’d all be without recipes to guide the way we cook, but I’ve started to see how limiting and confusing recipes can be. No wonder people are overwhelmed and confused by cooking, when recipes state things as law and generally don’t explain why you’re doing things that way or what other options you have. Of course I understand that cookbooks wouldn’t sell very well if recipes included all of that information and blossomed to paragraphs upon paragraphs of notes and instructions – but I do think that recipes as written can be sort of counter-productive in teaching people how to cook. (And full disclosure, here: I’m about to give you two recipes. Part of the problem, I am.)
All this is to say that I’ve started to notice a bit more rebellion and a bit more of the scientific process – two generally dormant parts of my personality – coming out in the kitchen. As I understand more about the potential techniques and options that can go into the making of a cookie, for instance, I start to question the instructions of various recipes. I start to wonder what would happen if I took the baking technique of one recipe and added it to the dough of another. Or what would happen if I chilled the dough. Or if I added a bit more spice. And then I start to experiment.
