“Imagination fuels invention”. That exact phrase doesn’t get any less true in the kitchen. Many iconic dishes that we love today were actually made with no more than simple kitchen ingenuity.
One of the best known creation of food is chocolate chip cookies. Ruth Graves Wakefield became famous for inventing the baked goodies in her guest house in 1938 by adding chocolate chips to butter cookie dough. The spaghetti alla puttanesca is another. An Italian classic, it was reputedly made by Sandro Petti during a night shift in the 1950s when he had nothing else to serve hungry customers but pasta noodles, four tomatoes, two olives, and capers.
Modern culture isn’t complete without its own slew of fusion cuisine—from matcha-crazed dishes or boba tea concoctions to the recent mania over Dalgona coffee and ube cheese pandesal. Everyone can come up with novel ideas, but there is one important question that stops us in our tracks: How do I come up with an appetizing menu without making a kitchen nightmare?
Step One: Start with something familiar
Try thinking of the last time you added a little something to your food to make it taste better. Maybe put a little salt in your soup, or a little pepper. Maybe toasted your bread a bit to improve the flavor. Either way, the flavors you were trying to improve were already familiar to you—maybe the bread got a bit stale or the soup a bit bland.
This little act of adding more complex tastes to food is actually the backbone of making your own recipes. In this case, starting with familiar ingredients.
To put it another way, start with ingredients with familiar tastes, textures, and aromas. That way, you have some control and predictability (which is good!) over the end result of your cooking experiment. Don’t start with too many unfamiliar ingredients at once!
And starting with “something familiar” isn’t only limited to ingredients. Different techniques are ways to make wholly different recipes—a boiled egg and a sunny side-up are very different, for instance.
A better example is how simple dough can be made into so many kinds of bread, using different handy techniques and adding a few ingredients at a time. The French are debatably one of the masters of making simple but delicious varieties of bread—from crispy, crusty baguettes and the rich brioche, to the pain aux noix, enriched by chopped walnuts—all of which came from simple dough.
Step Two: Find an Inspiration
This stage of making a recipe is often more organic. Inspiration can come from many different things. Maybe a special occasion or a life milestone, or maybe you decided to finally use your blender you have in your cabinet.
But more often than not, most of your inspiration will come from existing recipes. And that’s not a bad idea at all! Many of the popular foods we enjoy today come from fusions of the old and new, local and foreign. Case in point: the Japanese tempura was actually introduced to Japan by the Portuguese.
Scrolling through food Instagram is one good way to give you that ‘Aha!’ moment. Then again, you might just be overwhelmed by the amount of trendy foods that you see. Another good method is to scour old cookbooks or simple recipes online which can be the base for your kitchen invention.
From starting with something familiar, you can branch out into the unknowns. If you find something that piques your interest, think of how you can make it meaningful and different from what’s already out there.
Step Three: Experiment in small batches
Like a scientific experiment, testing in small batches will be a useful technique. With a paper and pen (or a word program on your phone or computer), list out the different techniques or ingredients that you will apply to different batches.
Suppose you want to invent a special cheesecake. Rather than making a full, round cake, prepare small batches of cheesecake, each with different variations you can think of. Maybe one will have orange zest as flavoring, the other lemon zest, and the other one flavored with pandan. After that, you can also taste test if the flavors survived baking or if they developed bad flavors. Or maybe, you can test if the cooking time should be shorter or longer.
The essentials basically boil down to how you can manage cooking time, flavors, techniques, to develop a palatable dish.
Having small batch experiments will help you save ingredients and time. And keep your notes! Your “research” will actually be useful if you plan on experimenting further in the future.
Step Four: Write down your recipe
Once you have decided on a final recipe, write or type down your recipe for future reference. Keep note of the exact measurements to ensure accurate results the next time around. But don’t forget to also list down the other tasty variants that you discovered.
Any new cooking technique you learn can be applied to so many different recipes, and learning about new ingredients only serves to widen your horizon. Cooking is a skill like any other. The best way to be better at it, is simply, more practice.
