"Burn your recipes!" If you've been following me for any amount of time now, you've heard me utter that statement time and time again. It's not that I'm entirely against using recipes for home cooking, it's more because I see cooking meals as a personal art form or your kitchen culinary expression.
In fact, home cooking recipes are especially useful if you're looking for new ideas and flavor combinations. Recipes are useful for cooking meals if you want to try to duplicate something exactly.
Here are some of the things that recipes will tell you:
• The ingredients to use
• The correct weights and measures for the ingredients
• The temperatures and degrees to use
• How much time you should cook
• What steps to take and when
But, you can't expect recipes to tell you everything that you need to know to make the meal come to life. I like to make analogies between cooking and music. Let's take sheet music for example. There are things that sheet music doesn't tell the piano player. There are variations in tone, pace, and interpretation. The musician has to bring the music to life through his or her own interpretation of the music that they are reading.
Here are some of the things that recipes don't tell you:
• Variations in ingredients/substitutions
• Variations in measurements/ mistakes in measuring
• Variations in oven temps/stove temps
• Variations in time
• Why you are taking the steps you are taking
There are very few celebrity chefs that I enjoy. An exception is Alton Brown. I enjoy Alton Brown's show because he also explains why he's taking the steps he's taking as well as how different ingredients, temperatures, etc. affect the food that you cook. One day when I was watching Alton, he was cooking a popover recipe that looked great. As I was watching, I thought that the amount of salt he used would make it too salty for me. But, when I tried to make the recipe, I used his exact measurements because, well, he's Alton Brown. Turns out the popovers were WAY too salty!
Next time, I'll take out some of my own recipe books I use for inspiration and point out some of the ways that I know the recipe book is broken. My goal is to help you to increase your kitchen culinary skills by using your home cooking recipes to cook meals that you can be proud of again and again.
Chef Todd Mohr is a classically trained chef, entrepreneur and educator. Chef Todd's simple philosophy - burn your recipes and learn how to really cook - has helped many home cooks and professionals alike finally achieve success in the kitchen. Learn his 1 Secret for Free and discover how
online cooking classes can really teach you to cook!
I am thrilled to be an E-zine Expert Author and have a number of articles published on a variety of cooking topics (and write new ones all the time!) Page down to see the entire list and click the ones that are helpful to you.
Before I became Chef Todd Mohr, I was Todd Mohr - a guy who liked to cook. A lot of people, including me, even thought I was a pretty good cook. For starters, I had my five meals, well, recipes, I suppose, that I could make well. Being a creative person, I also used some of the techniques from my tried and true \"recipes\" to experiment a bit with new dishes. Some were good and some not so good, and I usually never knew what the difference was.
Through a series of events, I decided to change careers in 1996 and pursue my passion for cooking, so I enrolled in Baltimore International Culinary College. 18 months later, I emerged: Chef Todd Mohr.
The greatest thing I learned in culinary school was the \"how\" and the \"why\" that had been missing from my cooking all those years. My recipes only gave me the \"what\" - which left so much out! The greatest thing I gained in the years after culinary school, was the practical experience from working in kitchens and experimenting at home. Being observant, I learned even more \"hows\" and \"whys\" in addition to \"whats\" along my culinary journey. This experience and experimentation, more than anything else, is what turned Todd Mohr into Chef Todd Mohr.
My experience includes kitchen experience - all the way up to Executive Chef, as well as college teaching experience, starting and operating a successful catering company and then finally, the culmination of all of my passion: opening The Cooking School in Cary NC in 2007.
From The Cooking School, came \"Cooking Coarse\", my daily video blog that quickly gained a loyal You Tube following due to the uniqueness of the instruction offered. It was through feedback received from \"Cooking Coarse\" viewers that I decided to launch WebCookingClasses.com and provide this information to the world.
When I started getting emails that my videos had changed people\'s lives, I knew I was on to something and that was when WebCookingClasses.com was born.
This is my passion - I am excited to share it with you!
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