Gravy's Cooking Thread

I also do what Brutul does.

I've started being more liberal with experiment with my baking recipes. I recently started using whole wheat flour for my cookies and you can hardly tell the difference for example. But I'm sure there's going to be a cookie where it bites me in the ass and have to throw it all out. That's the price of failure in baking, usually no way to salvage things when they go south.

Baking takes a certain hand, and it isn't the same methodology that is used in grilling/saute entrees at all.

When it comes to recipes, I apply liberal doses of personal experience to any item, unless it is a baked good. Because I avoid them like the plague. If a recipe says to use x tsps of tumeric and y tbsps of curry, I will play with it as I add them and go off fragrance and "stir feel" as I move things around (in dishes where you move things around) more often than simply plugging and playing the recipe as a whole.

Really, as you go along in cooking, you start to understand certain seasoning/spice combos and ratios that are a better fit with what you are trying to do. I'm not sure if there are any hard and fast rules with that; I've certainly never come across any. Maybe the 1:1 salt/pepper ratio that I've seen preached in certain seasoning usage that I basically 100% of the time go for a 1:2 salt to pepper ratio. If you can taste the salt, you're doing it wrong.

Mrs. Gravy said:

Forgive me if this question has been posed already. But do you always use a recipe? How many of you just toss things together?
G had an ability to dump stuff in a pan and it would come out spectacularly.
He was not even allowed in the kitchen during meal prep when he was a kid. He got a job when he was in high school working in the "snack bar/grill" area of a fitness club (free food and he got to look at hot bodies) that started him on his road to quality cooking. He just seemed to know what would taste good - what seasonings or ingredients would work well together.
He could follow a recipe, sure - and he did (thanks to many of you I got to benefit from it) but he didn't always cook from a recipe. In cooking, I sometimes do but often not to the letter, in baking I almost always do.
Anyway, the question popped in my head as I was dumping herbs and spices into the stock pot in which I was (am) making turkey soup.

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It depends on knowledge I think.

If you wing it whilst knowing nothing, you will quite likely make garbage. My old roommate Mike is the exemplar of this. He looked at all fresh food as gross and all packaged processed food as 'real' food. He would 'wing it' by mixing Taco Bell hot sauce on a bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese and Totino's pizza rolls. I would be hard pressed to consider this some form of genius, but I'm sure some do.

If you have the courage to wing it whilst still knowing a thing or two? We often call that practice, in any profession, 'magic'.

I am in the recipe stage of food to be honest. I can 'wing it' in other aspects of my life, but not quite this one yet. I grew up helping mom in the kitchen a lot of nights. But I always saw it as a negative and a chore. Only recently have I begun to appreciate some of the basic abilities I learned from that life with her. I get the base concepts of the physics of it all. I am not quite into the level of 'artist' though. I can earn praise from friends and family for making good food because I understand the motion of molecules in the pan and the biological substance that it represents, but I am usually following instructions as to the ingredients.

Seasoning experimentation is key to growth. You'll probably latch onto some staples as you go, but the key is to play with what you know. And apply it constantly. If you make some mid-range marinara one day with a standard 1O 1T 2B breakdown (1 part oregano, one part thyme, 2 parts basil) and then decide to switch it up? That's good shit. As long as you don't go bonkers with like 3 parts oregano to 1 of the others, you'll have something edible that isn't overpowering, and you can gauge the effects.

Just don't experiment with saffron. That is an expensive ass process. Know, to at least some degree of what you are looking for, before tossing seasonings in. You'll basically winnow down the stuff you don't like while capitalizing on stuff you do. Then the test is hoping that other people like what you've made.

Advanced shit like pairings can wait for a different day; figure out what you like making, and how you like making it, and then make sure it is edible. After that, it's just application.

BrutulTM said:

You can absolutely tell the difference between whole wheat and white flour in most things. I don't know what kind of cookies you're making but I have a friend that went through a phase of baking all kinds of shit with whole wheat flour and most of it totally sucked but she told herself that it was good. The worst was fucking pie crust. Her teenage daughter made a lemon meringue pie and she was so proud of it but the crust was fucking appalling because she made it with whole wheat flour. I choked it down and pretended to like it for the girl's sake but that shit was not good. Pie crust done right if my favorite part of the pie and if people are eating the filling and leaving the crust behind on your pie then you have failed at pie.

Like I said, I have not tried your cookies and maybe they are good, but as a general rule substituting wheat flour for white in any pastry recipe is not good. In general I say fuck "healthy" desserts. Dessert is not healthy and the tiny bit of fiber you get from using whole wheat flour isn't going to make them healthy. If you're going to have dessert, you might as well enjoy it rather than making it unhealthy AND unenjoyable too.

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I brought them to work, no one noticed. Things to keep in mind with whole wheat - Yes it has higher protein, but gluten only forms when flour and water is mixed. The longer/faster you mix the batter, the more gluten development you get. So it's important to only mix till fully incorporated. Also, let the batter sit longer before forming your cookies and putting in the oven. The whole wheat will take longer to absorb moisture than regular, but it will given time. Lastly, I didn't use all whole wheat, it was a 60/40 blend whole to regular. And besides, I actually like a little chew to my cookies, so it's also a preference thing.

As far as pie crusts etc I'd be more careful as those are more prized for their flakyness. One trick for pie crusts is to make sure you use chilled water, and substitute some of the chilled water for chilled vodka. The vodka lets you form the crust without aiding in gluten development and the alcohol bakes out.