If I may add…

I recently tweeted to Chris Kimball via @foodista, who accepted the challenge, that Kimball is completely missing the point. In it, I added, “IMO learning how to cook is a question of tinkering and breaking free of recipes. ”

It’s not the recipes that I keep going back to Cook’s Illustrated for. It’s the stuff around the recipes I find so much more valuable: the diagrams about how to truss a bird or roast, the explanations about what attempts with which ingredients produced different flavours, the tips about why adjusting temperature during baking produced better textures etc. It’s the same reason I am an avid fan of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” and his books.

However, I also turned to Gourmet, but for vastly different reasons. Like Kimball’s somewhat self servicing op-ed piece, I believe the demise of Gourmet has to do with poor management at Conde Nast and it misjudging the state of its audience.

I enjoyed Gourmet because Ruth Reichl and her crew published innovative dishes and photographed how they could be plated. Many complaints about Gourmet, post mortem, involve its former recipes and/or pieces employing ingredients that are difficult to find or prohibitively expensive. And, the recipes were equally difficult to attempt and often prone to failure.

I think people simply lost the ability to appreciate Gourmet because they’ve forgotten how to cook. Quite frankly, I’m no better. There are a little over a hundred posts involving recipes on my own blog.

Cooking is a dying art whose death is hastened by “paint by number” recipes. With people having too little time to devote to developing techniques or finding out why a recipe works, because we simply don’t have time to fail at making a dish anymore, everyone looks to recipes. Recipes in turn have become very granular and reflect this increasing loss of skill and understanding. Hence, why Kimball believes and perhaps rightly that his recipes are of higher quality than his contemporaries. His come from a professional test kitchen, staffed with trained cooks/chefs. His are somewhat fool proof.

When Kimball replied to me, he tweeted “Are recipes that much of a burden? I cook from recipes!!!” I replied ” u r not just cooking from recipes, u r cooking w/decades of experience, both yours and those of ur test kitchen.” He responded “That would be, I think, the whole point!”

Damn right! Yes Kimball’s recipes reflect the expertise he and his staff have developed over decades, but the recipes themselves do not pass on this expertise. Kimball cooks with experience that was gathered from a lifetime in a kitchen. We don’t. While we may use his recipes and produce great results, we gain nothing if we don’t read the “stuff” he publishes around his recipes.

There is a reason that cooking by taste isn’t heard of much anymore. There is a reason that Michael Ruhlman, author of Ratio, thinks foodies are masturbating deviants who “get off” on FoodTV. We barely cook anymore.

Is there a solution? What is written in the blog above. Crowd source and share expertise from learning how to cook again. Post insightful recipes that are more than just instructions. And most importantly, go play in the kitchen.

This comment was originally posted on chez Geek

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter