Cooking with Feelings

As I've cooked more and more the past few years, I've occasionally been asked for recipes. Unfortunately I'm way too lazy to cook with a recipe. I don't have any measuring spoons, and I can hardly visualize the quantity of a cup, a tablespoon, or any legitimate measurement. All I understand is what looks like the "right" amount for the respective amount of meat, vegetables, soup, or whatever it is I'm cooking. This is cooking with feelings.

Advantages of cooking with feelings:

1. I never have to get a measuring spoon
2. I have a deeper understanding of the depth of flavor each ingredient adds
3. It's quicker than measuring
4. Lots of legit chefs will tell you that a recipe is just a framework anyway. You can and should add/subtract from the recipe however you like, based on your feelings.

Why measurement falls short

Imagine you're following a recipe calls for a tablespoon of fresh cracked black pepper. What brand of black pepper? How coarse the crack size? What if you only have pre-cracked pepper? What if you only have white pepper?

In the end, the recipe does not call for the tablespoon of black pepper, but rather the amount of flavor which a tablespoon of black pepper can provide to the dish. Of course this amount of flavor is dependent on the one who wrote the recipe, or to the one following the recipe's personal tastes, and knowing the ingredient you're using allows you to adjust the dish according to your tastes.

Components of flavor

Flavor is not only limited to seasonings, like salt, pepper, thyme, star anise, sichuan peppercorns, etc, but also things like garlic, ginger, pepper, onion, celery, and pretty much any veggie.

As you're following, or constructing a recipe, don't be afraid to experiment with the amounts, according to your tastes and preferences. Assuming that you can properly extract the flavor from the amount of an ingredient you want to add, the resulting dish is ultimately dependent on the amount of each ingredient you add. Your feeling of each ingredient, taste, and resulting dish will continually be enhanced as you cook more and more, as we'll explore more below.

Developing your feeling

Let's say you're adding salt to a stir fry. It should be obvious that a single grain of salt would not be enough to salt the dish. It should also be obvious that adding a whole container of Costco's kosher salt would be way too much. So clearly, the amount of salt appropriate to the dish falls somewhere in between.

Let's narrow down the amount of salt further. If the amount of food that you're stir frying fills a bowl that you're using (the actual volume the bowl can hold doesn't matter here), adding an amount of salt that also fills the bowl is probably too much.

• What about half the bowl? Is that too much? Probably.
• A quarter of the bowl? Probably still too much.
• Enough salt to freckle the top of the food in the bowl? This should be pretty close, let's start here.

After finishing the stir fry, was it salty enough? Too salty? Now you have an intuition, a feeling, of how much salt should be applied, specific to your tastes. Who knows if the one tablespoon of salt that a recipe calls for is to your taste?

This not only applies to stir fries, but marinades, brines, and other seasoning. And of course, this not only applies to salt, but also other components of flavor, like garlic, peppers, chives, ginger, etc.

The next time you make the same dish, you can properly adjust, your feeling is nudging in the right direction. And even if it's wrong the second time, you still have a third and fourth try. And if your feeling is still incorrect, tough luck, this probably isn't for you.