As the semester came to an end this year, I knew I wanted to cook more. The previous months had been busy and the summer would finally offer an outlet to all my vaulted projects. Then came an idea:

"How can I use this time to actually improve my cooking skills"

Cooking is primarily a fun hobby for me, so over the years making simple recipes has come to feel mundane and repetitive. But despite having made many of the intricate foods I’ve wanted to, from croissants to hand pulled noodles, I’ve never been able to truly unlock kitchen freedom. While I consider my technique and intuition relatively developed, I’m definitely not skilled enough to just make something interesting. So I made a plan—my “Grand Scheme”—to apply to my cooking this summer, with a few goals:

1. Rely less on recipes

Recipes should be an invitation to something new—flavors, cuisines, ingredients, techniques, etc. However, I tend to use them as a rulebook, which has me buried in the measurements more than I would like.

For a long time now, I've been inspired by a framework-based approach rather than a recipe approach to cooking, strongly because of work by Ethan Chlebowski and J. Kenji Lopez Alt. I've implemented many skills from these two, but now I want to thoroughly embrace the process of being my own recipe-creator.

To get to a high level of comfort with a dish requires lots of research and often just trial and error. Luckily, we have the internet! So goal 1's solution is thorough research from good sources¹. By understanding what ties together many different variations of a dish, we can better understand what is fundamental and what is up for interpretation. Then, we can string together our own interpretation without need for precision (A.K.A. freedom). This is why I aim to understand important ratios, and why I always prefer to measure by weight.

2. Improvisation

Improvisation in the kitchen means being able to respond to unideal scenarios. This is important when not knowing what to do with available ingredients, not having the correct ingredients for a dish, or even reacting to a mistake.

---