Do you consider yourself a good baker? A great cook? A top notch chef? Are you a blue ribbon winning home baker? Have you begun an underground restaurant because you gave such stellar dinner parties? Do you think your palate is superior to anyone you eat with? Is your cookbook collection the envy of everyone? Is your recipe based blog highly trafficked? Do you give homemade candy as gifts? Have you taken innumerable cooking classes? Do you consume eggbeater for the recipes, or for insight into professional cooking? Did you read Michael Ruhlman's Ratio? Did it radicalize or bore you? Inspire or confuse you?
Recipe: a method for achieving some desired objective.
I'd like to pose a question.
Do recipes get in the way of learning to cook, bake?
At what point does a baker, a chef, no longer need recipes, or, when are recipes needed and when are they crutches?
It's too many questions, I know. Not of which can, truly, be answered. But I'd like to involve you in considering them with me.
Because I've worked a number of professional cooking/baking venues, and I've recently jumped from large scale bakery baking to tiny batch plated dessert component baking, these questions have come banging on my door in the middle of the night. They're many, and loud. And they don't let me sleepwalk through. They don't let me stay still. They make me itch with their curved lines and that enigmatic dot at their end.
?
Questions.
Questions without answers.
But questions that beget learning, delving, growing, understanding.
And then there are more questions.
Recipes, to get back to the subject, are validated. Everyone likes a good recipe. Recipes are passed down on notes, in book, translucent oily index cards. Unique handwriting scratchings. Recipes are whispered, graffitti'd, brought to the grave, tattood and celebrated.
Millions of trees have been cut down in the name of recipes. A cookbook is born every second. Recipes are facts. Recipes are coveted. You can trade a recipe like money, and there are as many recipes that 'wprk' as there are that 'don't work.' No one can argue with a good recipe, right?
And some recipes will live forever. In our hearts, in our minds. O recipe, we love you. For cliches ever on.
Is it blasphemy, then, to want to do away with recipes? Will I be witch hunted and burned alive for public view? Should I now beg for mercy, while you're silently collecting stones?
Recipes.What are they, though?
Recipes represent certainty. They are certainty. They represent logic, arithmatic, and maybe even math. And we hate, we despise, we murder, we denounce uncertainty. We approve of Empirical and we're not afraid to erase its opposite.
We love facts. We love when things make sense.
Well, many of us at any rate.
Intuition.Intuition represents uncertainty. Intuition is touchy-feely. Intuition is something beyond logic and is sometimes re-named as common sense. Intuition is related to psychic and many people would disregard all such subject as hokus pokus, never even needing to wash their clean logical hands of it because to them it never existed in the first place! Intuition is not empirical. Intuition is heart and love and none of these things exist under a microscope.
You either have a good sense of direction or you don't.
Intuition.
What is it? We define it by what it is not because we don't know what it is. And we despise uncertainty. We discard illogical. We call it crazy, hysterical, ridiculous, a farce, a scam; we want to stand on the other side of it and put it in the dunce's corner.
But you know what?
It's fear. We are terrified of uncertainty. We embrace safety & surety and we do everything in our power to keep groundlessness at bay or, better yet, throw it in the bay.
Can intuition be taught? Inspired? Can inspiration be dispensed? Does it take one great teacher to move you beyond, and delve you deeper, or many? Or none? Do you either have it or you don't?
What if you're somewhere in between? What if you sit on a fence, are a switch, can go both ways, are all ways, like bois & grrls, can see beyond what's at the tip of your nose, have a thing for sublimating the paradigm, live outside the pink box, use a recipe and intuition both, think with all of your brain, don't believe in opposites?
I believe in recipe and intuition both. Combined. In tandem. A guild, if you will.
I believe, though, that recipes can {sometimes} block intuition. {Especially when used alone.}
I believe if one places the recipe before what one knows to be true, that's where {some of the} trouble begins.
That's when "Bad Things Happen."
And, so, I beg of you to consider this.
I ask you to step outside the comfort and safety of recipes, especially only ever making a recipe once, or casting aspersions upon a recipe and it's supposed author/parent because 'it didn't work!' for you.
A recipe is a guide. A recipe is a series of suggestions, of possibilities. A recipe is a ratio.
One of the very first 'cookbooks' ever suggested to me was Le Repertoire de la Cuisine. While it is a compilation of recipes and methods, there are no measurements, no implicit instructions. Upon first glance there are merely lists. And yet, what one finds, upon closer and inquisitive inspection, is patterns.
And within patterns, there lies quiet learning.
Protein always does the same thing, whether in flour or chicken, egg whites or oranges.
Leavening can always be relied on to rise, whether via yeast, baking powder, egg whites, steam.
You may cook and bake for very different reasons than I, I know. You may not be seeking what lies around the corner from your tried and true tested recipes. You may think I'm relating recipes to life in a way that's silly and indulgent. You may not think everything is related, as I do.
I'm not asking you to set fire to your cookbook collection or never spend too many hours again on recipe based food blogs. I'm not even asking you to humor me by swallowing what I have to say whole.
All I'm asking, suggesting, is that you consider.
Consider stepping back from recipes. Consider how you learn, how you jump to the next level of learning, how you quietly cross lines and borders into new cooking/baking territory.
When you feel the bicycle under you, un-held, unsupported, for the first time, it's an exhilarating, terrifying, ebullient thrill! You don't know how you don't tip over; it's magic!
Baking is alchemy.
Tried & True Science, and mystery both.
Ingredients respond as much to logic as they do to love.
Recipes are ratios, but no ingredient stands still. Flour is not one thing, and neither is water. Ever block of butter, all around the world, will react differently. Even two sugars are not what you think they are, even though they look the same under a microscope!
If ingredients are alive, and changeable, then so must be recipes. And us; those who use, abide by, share, trade, give, alter, mix, fight with, discard, write & re-write, must also be amenable to holding on and letting go both, all.
Recipes & Intuition live on a spectrum. They are not opposites. Both are certainty & uncertainty. Two sides of one coin.
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