How does one develop new recipes?

[allioop108]

For all the years that I've been cooking, none of the recipes I have used have been mine. I have used recipes that I've found on the Net, in newspapers, in this forum or family hand me downs and I don't know the originality of those. I have not been brave enough to develope my own original recipe for fear of having to discard something that did not turn out right and because I still need lots of experience in mixing and matching ingredients. I have modified or improvised existing recipes for various reasons. So now I'm wondering where do the rest of the forum members get their recipes. Has anyone created their own unique recipes and what's involved in such a process?

Allen
allioop108@aol.com

[GB]

Trial and error is your friend. It took me a long time before I felt confident enough to make something up myself. When I finally did I realized that it was not really that hard. Sometimes I had great successes and other times horrible failures. I learned from the failures. That is what it is all about.

I will give you the example of my dinner tonight. I had a hamburger patty that was leftover from the weekend. I had a nice squash that I pulled in from my garden (the first thing from my garden this summer). I wanted to use the squash, but how?

What I did was break up the hamburger and cook that in a fry pan. I drained the fat and threw in a little butter then threw in the squash which I had chopped up. While that was in the pan I cooked up some whole wheat pasta. When the pasta was done I drained it and tossed it into the meat and squash. I found some parmagiano regiano in the fridge and grated some of that on top. My wife walked in the kitchen and I asked her if she wanted some spice or not. She said yes so I reached for my crushed red peppers and put some in. To finish I went to the garden and got some basil which I tore up and put in, then I poured a little extra virgin olive oil in and served. It was delicious.

Basically I just though of flavors that would work well together and saw what I had on hand. I tried something and thankfully it worked.

[GB]

Oh I forgot about the vermouth that I poured into the pan with the meat and squash.

[TATTRAT]

I develop soley from insperation a quality ingredient gives me. I like to play with the contrasts that accentuate, and highlight whatever it is I am working with. If you are firmiliar with your pallate, and flavours, the sky is the limit.

[Dina]

Developing your own recipes consists of experimenting basically. I first started tweaking my recipes then became comfortable enough to create my own. Your preferences is what makes you your creator of your own dishes. i.e fresh ingredients vs. canned, homemade vs. processed, the sky is the limit...

[TATTRAT]

You MUST also remember, recipies, unless pastry or baking, are not blue prints, just recemondations. Don't be scared to try to substitute something. The worst thing that can happen is the dog gets fed well.

[ChefJune]

My mom was one of the best home cooks I ever knew (or knew of) and I don't believe she ever made up" a recipe. She either followed a recipe or she cooked from memory those dishes she'd been making forever.

These days it seems as tho every cook wants to make up something new! and that's cool, but I'm not sure why it's such a goal. There are so many GREAT recipes out there to try.... form so many different cuisines. It is certainly possible to be a truly accomplished cook without ever making up recipes.

Restaurant chefs, on the other hand, are always being challenged to come up with "something new" -- to have "signature dishes" that set them apart from other chefs. IMO, that's a horse of a whole different color.

[Michael in FtW]

Well, in cookery you only have so many methods ... and you only have so many ingredients ... and how you combine them makes up all the different dishes we find in a kazillion recipes.

Are you looking to create dishes that have never before been created - or do you just want to cook a meal without having to break out a cookbook?

It's a matter of experience, a little time spent looking at recipes and understanding how they work, knowing your ingredients, and the guts or inspiration to try something that you don't have a recipe for.

When you watch something like IronChef America - or the other "home cook" cooking competitions for something like "best chicken recipe" ... it still is all based on the basics.

Taking a recipe and making modifications to it to make it taste the way you want - you have already made steps into creating your own recipes!

It just takes time, experience, inspiration, intuition sometimes, and the guts to try it! You also need to taste as you go along ... and write down exactly what you did/used if you want to create a recipe that you or others can reproduce.

[Little Miss J]

My sister is one of those annoying people who can eat something while she is out and then cook something similar at home without a recipe! I am not confident doing this myself...It tends to just flop when I try!! She can tell you what the main ingredients are and how a dish was put together quite often. Mind you she did play with her food a lot as a kid :)

[auntdot]

Think Michael is right, there are just so many ways to toss together just so many ingredients. So even though there are a kazillion recipes, many seem just to be a variation on a general recipe or theme.

To get a feel for how you can take a general 'basic' recipe and tweak it you might try to find a copy of Pam Anderson's How to Cook Without a Book (I think that is it, cannot find my copy right now).

But as GB aptly pointed out, many times we have ingredients and don't know what to do with them, they just don't seem to make the fixin's for a recipe we can recall. And then we punt.

Someitmes it is out of necessity (gotta get dinner on the table and no time to hit the market), at other times we buy something interesting and don't know exactly what to do with it, sometimes it is the leftover problem, and sometimes we just want to have some fun.

On thing I will do on occasion is look at the list of ingredients in a recipe without looking at the name of it or the directions and see what I can come up with.

I think it is much harder for those of us who have not been formally trained in cooking to do so, but we can always do our best.

And sometimes we even surprise ourselves.

Give it a try, you might have some fun.

Take care and God bless.