Question of the Week: Modifying Recipes

Now and again the same question will pop up over and over again as I interact with clients, friends, and family; over the past ten days or so the question de jour has focused on modifying recipes.

Of note, I’m not a formally trained chef (though at times I wish I’d followed that path), though I do spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen cooking good food, and invest a fair amount of time thinking about food through the lenses of health impact, nutrition, affordability, and availability.

Playing the Recipe Modification Game: The Easy Part

In a nutshell, my pitch to anyone striving to cook (or learn to cook) great tasting, healthy and nutritious food at home is simple when it comes to recipes. Gravitate toward foods and recipes that you know you (and your family) enjoy, dig in and do a bit of research, roll up your sleeves and start cooking.

When my wife and I approach a new recipe that’s caught our eye for whatever reason, we’ll typically cook it through at least once pretty much as written. If we make any substitutions on a first run, it’s typically subbing in a healthier fat or oil, which is almost always a safe bet from a cooking science and flavor standpoint.

Once that first run is done, and if we find the dish tasty and satisfying, for almost all (see below) recipes I like to dial in spices and flavors we enjoy, which typically in our kitchen means big flavors and more spice, often skewed to a Southwestern or Asian-fusion array of flavors.

Most importantly, we come from the school that insists cooking should be fun, intuitive, and yield healthy foods that taste great. Is every dish a home run? Hell no, but you’ll get better over time, and I can almost guarantee you that when shifting toward a more ancestral nutrition plan, you’ll find that flavors are deeper, richer, and more interesting the further along that path you wander.

I’d challenged you to consider most recipes starting points to work from as you develop your own skills, likes, and dislikes; it’s also key to remember what a chef friend reminds me every month or so – overly complex recipes aren’t always better, most often simply prepared, quality foods win the day.

Here’s a great example – a couple of weeks ago I posted this Grilled Sweet Potato, Onion, and Chile Salad recipe, and it’s delicious as written. Talking about that recipe a week or so later (in the context of the week’s menu plan), my wife comment she found the anise flavor notes of the basil a bit overwhelming, so I swapped it out for cilantro the next time around, and we both thought the recipe was exponentially better. Easy peasy, and we’ve now dialed in a great salad that resonates well with our family palate.

Modify away, customize to your hearts content, and share with the rest of us when your recipe tweaks produce a masterpiece. Your changes won’t all produce home runs, but you’ll score big most of the time…

The Exception to the Recipe Modification Game

As with most things in life, there are exceptions to the recipe modification game – that exception deals with baking.

In a nutshell, baking is much more of a science, historically requiring much more careful measurements of key ingredients to achieve the desired result. The centuries of baking history that have accumulated thus far are of course skewed to using traditional grain-based flours that most following an ancestral eating plan eschew today.

Baking using non-traditional, largely gluten-free components is a relative new game compared to the traditional baking world, and let’s face it, the alternative flours simply don’t behave the same way.

Bottom line, the baking game is one where recipes should be followed to the letter; if you’re going to change one up – do it in baby steps (change one component at a time and see how things turn out), and work from there.