steak are similar to those in a hamburger.
Still not too sure what I mean? Don’t worry, we’ll answer
all of these questions and more in due time.
THE FIRST STEP TO WINNING IS
LEARNING HOW NOT TO FAIL
Have you ever made the same recipe a half dozen times
with great results, only to find that on the seventh time, it
completely fails? The meat loaf comes out tough, perhaps,
or the pizza dough just doesn’t rise. Oftentimes it’s difficult
to point to exactly what went wrong. If you’re a tinkerer in
the kitchen, you like to modify recipes a bit here and there
to suit your own taste or mood. That’s all well and good,
and luckily, the first six times, your modifications didn’t
affect the outcome of the recipe. What changed on that
seventh time? Could it be the extra salt you added? Perhaps
the temperature of the room? Or maybe it’s that you ran out
of olive oil and used canola instead. Perhaps your stand
mixer was on the fritz, so you blended everything by hand.
The point is, there are many ways you can stray from a
written recipe, but only some of those forays will cause the
recipe to fail. Being able to identify exactly which parts of a
recipe are essential to the quality of the finished product and
which parts are just decoration is a practical skill that will
open up your opportunities in the kitchen as never before.
Once you understand the basic science of how and why a
recipe works, you suddenly find that you’ve freed yourself
from the shackles of recipes. You can modify as you see fit,
fully confident that the outcome will be a success.