Memes

I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and I still can't do it. I'll always add too much or not enough.

Tasting is how you're supposed to do it.

I however just start throwing shit in and wait for the surprise at the end.

I AGREE WITH YOU!

I give them one try and the next time I do it my way.

I usually try to stick reasonably closely to the recipe the first time I'm trying something out. That way if I don't like the result, I know it's not just that I ruined the recipe with my modifications.

I don't do it, because I usually get confused by them, but it makes sense to me. I don't know what will taste good, and by following a recipe you can leverage someone's experience to get something that tastes good. Personally I just accept that I often eat something mid in the pursuit of good cooking skills

I almost always follow a new recipe the first time around to understand what the dish is generally supposed to be. After that, I start riffing off of it to make it what I want it to be. But you gotta know which general direction the dish was originally headed before you can successfully play with it if you're a Home Gamer in the kitchen.

Especially when there are so many absolute garbage recipes by people whose jobs are writing content for magazines or SEO where the only requirement is that the picture of the food look good and selling weird kitchen instruments.

Which is slightly better than our parents learning on recipes designed to use as many ingredients sold by Campbells as possible.

95% of recipes floating around these days just fundamentally misunderstand the dish they're trying to create, like 3/4

Ever been to a restaurant, ate a meal cooked by somebody other than yourself? Pre-made frozen meal? Fast food?

Dont want to sound mean or anything but most people are comfortable with having somebody else prepare a meal, so why is it different when you prepare it but somebody else tells you how to do it?

I think that's why some people "can't cook". They treat a dish like a magic potion, where you'll destroy the house if you add 2g too much chilli or something.

And the taste changes with salt, with heat, with boiling, with cold extraction (like an overnight marinade). You really just have to experiment.

Terrible how they decieve us

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.

...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...

can't recreate it

This is the main downside IMO