If you aren’t cooking by vibe, are you really living?
Baking on the other hand…
Baking by vibe takes some work, and you should practice recipes by the letter before trying it, but it can be fun. It’s more so knowing the impact of what you’re adding.
Spices, for instance, can be added by vibe to some recipes. Flour, on the other hand, should be weighed out and a firm knowledge of ratio to fat rather then vibes.
I had to bake by vibes one time because I started a recipe then realized I didn’t have eggs and the friend the cake was for is lactose intolerant. Used a can of coconut milk. Turned into brownies instead of chocolate cake, but they were good enough that I’ve been intentionally making them since.
So like cooking, if you are making a recipe of something new it’s important to follow the recipe to know how it tastes then next time you know what to tweak to make it taste more like what you like
My wife says that everything I cook smells the same. Yeah baby I know what I like.
With a deep enough knowledge of how baking works, it can be done. My sister improvises baked goods very well. The sad thing is that when one turns out amazing instead of just good, she can’t replicate it because she doesn’t know the recipe. I’m particularly sad I’ll never again have the amazing butter rum pound cake she made for her daughter’s birthday last year. She tried to make it again later, but it just wasn’t the same. :(
It requires more precision, sure, but there are absolutely bakers who can taste a dough and tweak the water/flour/oil etc. ratios to get the perfect bread.
It’s only different from other kinds of cooking because most people haven’t developed those senses. If you knew what you were doing, you could bake from scratch without a recipe easily and go by “vibes” (i.e. based on sensory input).
Well, cooking normally doesn’t require rising. Baking usually does. Knowing how chemicals react and how yeast acts is important. Cooking is mostly just about flavor. You should know about the Maillard reaction and burning, but as long as the flavors are good (and you don’t cook something that’ll make you sick) then you’re going to be fine.
I’m pretty sure most cooks use spices according to their internal feelings on what contexts the spices work well in. Basically the smell test except they have enough experience with the spice already to just do it in their head. Pretty sure this isn’t that unusual.
The human sensory experience is much more varied and foreign to your own than you think. Some can combine flavours in their head, others couldn’t explain a flavour they eat daily unless it was in their mouths at the time.
I’m in the latter group but a supertaster and can tell what it’s missing with a spoonful usually. Couldn’t tell you what the result will taste like but know it’s lacking salt, cumin, herbs, etc. Wee sniff of what you’re going to add as you swallow to confirm.
That’s me when my family wants me to whip up a random pasta lunch. Hmm, mulled black peppercorn and garlic? A bit of paprika? Tomato paste, oh now it definitely needs oregano.
Shit, I’m just making pasta alla vodka again.
Tbf, pasta alla vodka is really never a bad choice.
I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and I still can’t do it. I’ll always add too much or not enough.
I can’t even smell anything well, my taste is very weak, but I know what my kids respond to, and after several years I have a good sense of how much of any spice will work.
Amount is the experience part. Hard, if not impossible, to estimate by smell alone.
“Can you share the recipe?”
“Nope!”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, I don’t remember.”
for me it’s easy because i mostly remember what i just made. but that’s also because i pay special attention to what i do and what comes out afterwards, kinda to do semi-structured research.
Some people would definitely not remember all the details, but yeah, this might not be an issue for others.
All cooking is vibes based.
It’s baking where you’ve got to plan it out like d-day.
I’m the rabbit. I also do a lot of tasting.
You may scream now.
Tasting is how you’re supposed to do it.
I however just start throwing shit in and wait for the surprise at the end.
And now the rabbit is in the corner too, what animal are you?
I AGREE WITH YOU!
My chef yells at me because I do this all the time.
Though he’s mainly mad because I didn’t measure a single fuckin thing and can’t recreate it
can’t recreate it
This is the main downside IMO
also, if you do write down the recipe and try to recreate it on another day, it doesn’t work because your mood has changed and now the flavor doesn’t match anymore.
has happened to me many times now.
If your chef has a nose and taste buds he should be able to figure it out by remaking it a few times.
It’s not that he can’t recreate it, it’s that my coworkers can’t.
That sounds like you are making yourself indispensable.
Why yes, I do put a little cayenne pepper in my chicken soup. Why do you ask?
Cayenne goes on everything
That’s Frank’s
If it doesn’t clear my sinuses completely how is it supposed to cure me? Of course it needs cayenne.
Wait until OP discovers that spices don’t always taste like they smell…
tried beer for the first time yesterday, thought it would be better than the smell. Nope. Struggled through 3 sips then gave it to someone else 😭 I don’t really get alcohol tbh. Ive only had like 3 or 4 drinks but no matter what it is they all taste bad :/
So, the first thing you need to know about alcohol is it’s an intoxicating drug. It is a depressant, its short-term effects include reduced inhibitions which in the moment can feel like increased confidence, and overall reduction in physical motor skills, plus a mild euphoria. Also makes your face feel slightly numb. That’s most of alcohol’s selling point.
Alcohol on its own is rather unpleasant to have in your face. A lot of cocktail culture sprung up around hiding alcohol with other flavorings so they’re in any way pleasant to swallow.
You might try something like whiskey and coke, I’d specifically go with American or Canadian whiskies here; scotch doesn’t really bring the right flavors for this. There’s a reason Jack Daniels or Crown Royal are stereotypes. Vodka can also be a way in; it doesn’t bring a lot of flavor of its own so adding it to fruit juices can get you used to booze within familiar flavor profiles. Don’t worry about sticking to posted recipes, drop a tablespoon of vodka into a tall glass of orange juice and see what it does, then start upping the ratio.
Get used to that, you may then start exploring cocktails, getting into wine or beer, or neat spirits.
I fucking haaaaaaate hops, i hate the smell, i hate the taste, i also hate beer because i can literally smell the fermentation and it smells rotted.
Plenty of other ways to get turnt out there my friend
It’s an acquired taste.
Unless it’s an IPA, they’re gross and if someone drinks them then I assume they’re just suffering to be pretentious.
/s?
As for other booze, just make it like something you like to drink. Fruity vodka and sprite is banging. Rum and coke is a classic. I like creamy stuff so I put vanilla vodka, bailey’s, and milk together.
A lot of IPAs are gross. Some are quite good. Bitterness is the most maligned of all tastes. Tons and tons of bitter things that people love and every one of them is a love/hate acquired taste thing.
Grapefruit, bitter melon, bitter black coffee, any sort of bitter beer (IPAs aren’t the only one), heck even burnt sugar!
The biggest problem with IPAs is that crappy/inexperienced brewers use the bitterness of hops to cover up brewing defects. This leads to really gross aftertastes or overwhelming bitterness and only hipsters like drinking that crap.
For a hot minute there near the end of the Obama administration, craft beer was a thing in this country and we had some excellent beers. Then Trump got elected and I haven’t seen a craft beer that wasn’t an IPA or a token jet black “oatmeal stout” since.
The “craft” part got killed in the commercialization of the genre. So it’s become the modern version of Pabst. And there is a contraction of micro breweries at the moment as beer drinkers are slowly learning to pass on all the crap out there.
One of the weirdest takes I’ve ever seen. Bravo and well done for somehow working politics into this!
It’s a thing that happened and I’m not sure by what mechanism. 2018, lots of microbreweries and brewpubs most offering a wide variety, by 2021 you’ve got seven IPAs and one token stout on the menu.
Steel tariffs did hurt the craft beer industry actually
We’ve moved on to sours or IPA/sour combos. I drink them because they are delicious to my palate. Always drank my coffee black even as a kid. I like bitter.
Honestly I fucking hate the term hipster. I’m not hip, I’m a laborer in my 40s. It’s just another way for people to divide each other.
Mostly because they can’t be good at all of them. And there were/are a lot of bad brewers out there that don’t care about mastering the craft.
Oh I don’t disagree with you. I’ve looked for decent non-IPA microbrews and have been puzzled at the lack of selection! I just wasn’t aware of the timing.
The double IPA, the “I’m not an alcoholic” drink of choice.
The Belgian tripel- I’m an alcoholic with good taste and I don’t care who knows.
/sdefinitely not sarcasm.
You learn to associate the flavor with the drug and from there you start to appreciate the intricacies of the flavor. A good bourbon is sweet in the same way bakers chocolate is with a vanillin and other flavors picked up from the wood. Meanwhile a light wheat beer is almost like a bitter bread. Wine is like grape juice but with a lot less sweetness and more depth. And if you really want to get drunk without dealing with bitterness or wine flavors you can always go to mead, which tastes like the honey it once was
Im not usually a fan of alc but I do enjoy rice wine (korean flavored ones) and choya plum wine. Maybe you could try those? They’re moreso a sweet alcohol and doesnt have that weird earthy bitter taste imo
And the taste changes with salt, with heat, with boiling, with cold extraction (like an overnight marinade). You really just have to experiment.
“Measure carefully, friends!” - Chef Jean Pierre on YouTube as he yeets in approximately random eyeballed quantities of everything.
Isn’t this just a sign of inexperience? If you have been cooking for a reasonable time, you will know which spices to use when going for what sort of flavour.
yeah but there’s also a lot of people just seeing cooking as a chore and never really paying attention to it, therefore not learning much or anything at all.
it takes patience and a bit of dedication to actually learn cooking in a reasonable way. otherwise you’re just following recipe.
Considering the majority of flavours we experience are in fact smells, if you can cook by your nose you’re usually pretty safe on how the end result will come out.
I’m not a foodie nor a chef but I’ve been able to break apart and reproduce restaurant dishes just by smelling.
It’s the only way to season food. If you’re good enough, you can just imagine the flavors, but I still have to rummage the spice cabinet and sniff to get the dish to taste just right.
Critical is that HOW you learn this is trial and error.
Most people can imagine the result of combining two images, say a frog riding a turtle. We can imagine what a handful of wet spaghetti might sound like being dropped onto the hood of a car. We can imagine what a fluffy bunny that’s been rolling in sand might feel like.
But that isn’t just because those senses are somehow intrinsically better for synthesis and prediction. We just got a ton more practice with them. As kids we got to draw, we got to play with toys, we touched everything, we bashed all kinds of stuff together.
But most of us, we just got the food prepared for us with no awareness of the properties of the constituent ingredients.
You gotta act like a toddler in the kitchen to grow that part of your brain.
I binge watched a lot of Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares (the UK) one
The best tip ever given on those shows is Gordon Ramsay yelling “taste taste taste!” at everyone.
Tasting as you go is what improved my cooking the most. I also vigorously smell everything too.
I don’t even sniff them; I just remember how they taste/smell, and then I end up adding vanilla extract to savoury dishes and it tastes amazing
Fantastic.
You better get the hell out of my house immediately and never come back.
Blindly following recipes I will never get. How can you be comfortable with depending on a stranger’s whims for what you eat ?
I almost always follow a new recipe the first time around to understand what the dish is generally supposed to be. After that, I start riffing off of it to make it what I want it to be. But you gotta know which general direction the dish was originally headed before you can successfully play with it if you’re a Home Gamer in the kitchen.
Ever been to a restaurant, ate a meal cooked by somebody other than yourself? Pre-made frozen meal? Fast food?
Dont want to sound mean or anything but most people are comfortable with having somebody else prepare a meal, so why is it different when you prepare it but somebody else tells you how to do it?
I give them one try and the next time I do it my way.
I usually try to stick reasonably closely to the recipe the first time I’m trying something out. That way if I don’t like the result, I know it’s not just that I ruined the recipe with my modifications.
I don’t do it, because I usually get confused by them, but it makes sense to me. I don’t know what will taste good, and by following a recipe you can leverage someone’s experience to get something that tastes good. Personally I just accept that I often eat something mid in the pursuit of good cooking skills
Especially when there are so many absolute garbage recipes by people whose jobs are writing content for magazines or SEO where the only requirement is that the picture of the food look good and selling weird kitchen instruments.
Which is slightly better than our parents learning on recipes designed to use as many ingredients sold by Campbells as possible.
95% of recipes floating around these days just fundamentally misunderstand the dish they’re trying to create.
I think that’s why some people “can’t cook”. They treat a dish like a magic potion, where you’ll destroy the house if you add 2g too much chilli or something.
No, they are just lazy.
I cook by vibe mostly because I don’t have the items the recipe calls for. So I typically substitute whatever I have that I think fits or smells right. Works well 9/10, just when someone asks me what I used to make something, I have no fucking clue.
You guys don’t cook by smell?
