Recipe Development
I was reading a blog post on recipe development and thought I’d present my own.
My recipe development is a fairly straightforward process and kind of follows the Iron Chef mentality. It’s not so much as a race against a 60 minute clock but I rarely cook for more than an hour. I like everything from when I begin to am eating to be 30-45 minutes.
For half a year now I have been working a bit off of recipes I have picked up from various spots (magazines, internet, cookbooks, etc) and using those as inspiration onto my own creation. Sometimes I cook a recipe following all of the directions but that is rare - I am much more apt to do my own thing.
Another habit picked up from Iron Chef is a theme. It is sometimes an ingredient but sometimes a cooking technique. Lately I’ve been working with saute style recipes due to their speed and excellent taste and so I might focus on a cooking technique along with an ingredient (such as my mango lemon chicken recipe).
I have been trying a lot of new things so I will read a few recipes until I find some that I like and then create my own recipe script that I bring into the kitchen. I am usually combining a few recipes so it doesn’t make sense to print anything. Instead I blueprint what I want to do.
Following that I head into the kitchen and follow my recipe - making adjustments as necessary.
The last recipe I tried was different in that I didn’t go into it with a plan but instead wrote what i was doing while I did it. I didn’t really like this - I was trying to capture all of the steps I made while also cooking a meal and I was time crunched.
My end results can be excellent (an example was a red snapper recipe i created before I began blogging) and also not so much. I think that is the most important part of recipe development - take risks on something original and enjoy the rewards and not be disappointed by the tribulations along the way.