/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.19246749]

how do I intuitively judge ingredient ratios without a recipe?

[Anonymous No.19246751]

>>19246749
Practice.

[Anonymous No.19246753]

experience

[Anonymous No.19246767]

>>19246749
Unironically smoke cigarettes, and lots. The imagination pics up the slack the smoking causes on the tongue when you eat, which trains the imagination to taste. Smoking is the price every chef must pay. It's like the blinding of a seer.

[Anonymous No.19246881]

>>19246749
>look at recipe
>distinguish core ingredients from garnishes and spices
>remember ratio of core ingredients, e.g. 2 parts water to 1 part milk or whatever
Béchamel is for example is a roux (which itself is 1:1 flour and butter), then add enough milk to make it creamy and almost too liquid, add nutmeg, salt and pepper, reduce sauce at low heat until sufficiently viscose, done

[Anonymous No.19246897]

measure your ingredients until you feel you can confidently say "eh fuck it I don't need to get my cups dirty I can just eyeball it"

[Anonymous No.19246902]

>>19246749
You just cook a lot man. That's really it, I spent a year trying to cook a new dish every day and that probably helped me more than anything/

[Anonymous No.19246905]

>>19246749
Constant practice using written recipes until you can eyeball it and apply the same logic to other dishes. Judgement is a hard thing to teach, you need the confidence to add or not add the right ratio of ingredients without second guessing yourself

[Anonymous No.19246909]

>>19246749
As already said, experience and practice. There are definitely some ratios you're going to want to memorize, but for most things you should be able to think through the ingredients and kind of figure out what looks right, and then adjust as necessary. You do want to really think about what you're adding, though, which is something a lot of people who rely on recipes don't do.

>>19246767
As a smoker with a pretty good palate I'm going to say this is bullshit. I actually thought about it for a minute, but no, your theory doesn't make any sense.

[Anonymous No.19246918]

>>19246909
The occult doesn't have to makes sense, I just tried anyways. Still doesn't change the fact that those who create the tastiest food(yes, you too ;-) ) all smoke which is objectively terrible for one's sense of taste.

[Anonymous No.19246926]

>>19246918
if you're referring to restaurant professionals, all restaurants have strict adherence to a recipe. All they're doing is learning an exact recipe and then repeating it thousands of times.

[Anonymous No.19246955]

>>19246749
By seeing and feeling them, then by taste for next time.

[Anonymous No.19246965]

>>19246926
>open bag
>microwave 3 minutes

[Anonymous No.19246968]

>>19246881
>1:1 flour and butter
1:1 you mean grams?

[Anonymous No.19246970]

>>19246902
i've cooked for 3 years, daily, and i still measure everything I use. 150g pasta, always, 150-200g protein, it doesn't get better no matter how much i cook

[Anonymous No.19247003]

>>19246897
This. Except you keep weighing everything and don't give in to cynicism. Enjoy your *** rating in the Michelin guide when you're 55.

[Anonymous No.19247005]

>>19246970
>weighs his pasta
Sorry, fren. Intuition isn't something that comes easy to autists.

[Anonymous No.19247007]

>>19246918
>all smoke which is objectively terrible for one's sense of taste
That's the thing. Whenever I quit for a week or two it's like I get a canine tier smelling super power and I can pick things up like 5 times better. There's no substitute for actually being able to taste.
>>19246926
>all restaurants have strict adherence to a recipe
>all they're doing is learning an exact recipe and then repeating it thousands of times
That's probably true at a place like Applebee's, but in a normal restaurant probably half, if not two thirds of everything you're making doesn't have an exact recipe. In any case, you're always tasting and adjusting things, because most ingredients don't always behave exactly the same, or have the same flavors. That's honestly why restaurant food is typically much better than what most people cook at home. The cooks spend all day tasting and adjusting and fixing problems and improvising when the regular ingredients didn't come in, etc. People like to think of cooking like science, where you're just following an exact series of steps with a predictable outcome, but there's a huge human element. This is why every recipe says "salt and pepper to taste", and why robots are never going to replace actual line-cooks in our lifetime.

[Anonymous No.19247010]

>>19246749
Cook it once with a recipe, and pay attention to the consistency of everything, notice textures, firmness, how hard it is to stir something, how soft/bouncy something is.

If you like it, you can cook it again without the precise measurements and go by feel.

[Anonymous No.19247047]

>>19246968
Yeah and he's wrong of course. The flour is only there to bind the sauce. The less flour you use the better your sauce will taste.
>>19246970
A standard pasta serving in a restaurant is 100g pasta per person (even that is way too much). The daily recommended amount of meat per person is 100g. You're eating double of what you should.

[Anonymous No.19247085]

>>19246749
You don't. Unless your ambition is to become a shit cook. Good recipes are extremely rare. Once you stumble into a good recipe you want to be able to reproduce it.

Which is impossible. Spring cauliflower tastes (far better but) different from regular autumn cauliflower. Milk lamb and veal taste different from their autumn nephews. Milk from May/June produces better cheese (far better cheese). Tomatoes are best in August and September. And so on, and so on. Even if you measure everything to the gram and second, you'll still be facing very different outcomes.

[Anonymous No.19247152]

>>19247047
>Yeah and he's wrong of course. The flour is only there to bind the sauce. The less flour you use the better your sauce will taste.
The (standard) ratio of 1:1 anon described says exactly zero about how much flour is being used in the total sauce volume you fuckin' saucist.

[Anonymous No.19247180]

>>19246926
normal restaurants constantly taste what they are making and adjust accordingly

[Anonymous No.19247191]

>>19246749
That "thing" is such a fag, he sucks pole and trying to be Sting while failing miserably. He's like chicken running around with its head chopped off. BORING

[Anonymous No.19247209]

Sparrows around my windows are more interesting than that british fob cunt with the background music and shaky cam.

[Anonymous No.19247218]

Make dishes that require entire packages of ingredients. For example, I just put a pot roast in the oven. I didn’t measure anything. One onion, one bunch of carrots, one celery heart, one 8oz pkg mushrooms, one small pkg each fresh rosemary & thyme, all peeled & chopped. Toss in salt & pepper as desired.

[Anonymous No.19247231]

>>19247218
That's the granny method, always listen and watch ol granny.

[Anonymous No.19247235]

>>19247218
Also a rough spoonful of minced garlic, a dash of woostasher and an indiscriminate amount of wine and stock.

[Anonymous No.19247243]

>>19247235
What is this, realize the good magic of the wire.

[Anonymous No.19247246]

>>19246970
If you're cooking is bad and you want it to be good, then your cooking will have to change. If you never change anything, well, big surprise, it's never going to get better.

[Anonymous No.19247389]

>>19247180
you're adjusting based on a recipe you arent just making the food however you want. a lot of restaurants even do recipe audits to make sure you're making the exact dish that is on the recipe with the right proportion of ingredients

[Anonymous No.19247396]

I eyeball everything, most of the times it works out fine. I could honestly give a fuck about measuring things.

Worst case I add too much coconut milk to curry and oh noes I have more curry

[Anonymous No.19247426]

>>19247389
>you're adjusting based on a recipe you arent just making the food however you want
Only the stupidest, most uncritical people view everything in binaries. That's why I will never respect anyone who ever supported Trump.