How to create your own recipes

There are times when recipes and food combinations are the result of fortuitous luck, but most often sound recipes are the result of planned combination of harmonious ingredients "hung" on to fundamental cooking techniques. If you have a few cooking techniques in your cooking "toolbox", you too can come up with your own recipes. I think the biggest fear for most cooks is fear of failure. You need to get over that one! The worst case is that you end up throwing away the food, but it's important to realize that failure leads to success and knowledge. Every great cook has had LOTS of disasters.

I want to share a method by which you can go about creating your own recipes. I saw it demonstrated by Chef Grant Achatz. This is how he and his staff develop ideas for food combinations, flavors, and texture at his restaurant. My example will be a recipe I created for the upcoming post. The first step is to pick your star ingredient.  I wanted to use pumpkin. Next step is deciding on a technique and the vehicle to showcase the pumpkin. I decided to make ravioli. So, the techniques required are pasta making and more specifically making ravioli. I have those techniques in my "toolbox" so I am good to go.


Here is the fun part! I needed to come up with some ingredient combinations for the pumpkin filling.
Begin by writing you star ingredient in the center of a piece of paper or board. Next, write down all the ingredients that you think would go well with the main ingredient. Juts let your mind flow freely with all sorts of ideas, imagining flavors and textures as you write them down. Now step back and think big picture as you imagine how each ingredient would taste with the pumpkin and how they would taste with each other. In the case of my pumpkin ravioli filling I wanted complementing herb(s) so I thought I would use the chives and nutmeg. I could have used the sage, or rosemary, but I didn't want to meld too many competing flavors. I chose to incorporate shallots and garlic for a nice flavor foundation. I chose lemon zest to add a slight acidity to counter the sugar of the pumpkin. I chose chopped toasted walnuts because I wanted a textural crunch in the filling and the toasted flavor would be nice against the pumpkin, but I could have easily just gone with a smooth textured filling. Finally, I wanted somethings to bind it all together so I added parmesan cheese and egg yolks.

It's important to realize that this is only a starting point. It's just a plan. Always taste! I have not made this dish yet. So far it's just conceptual, but when I compose the filling, I may realize that it's off, or it's missing something. It may not have enough flavor, or it may need something more to keep it dry enough to be used as a filling. Maybe my pumpkin is not sweet enough and I'll need to add some form of sugar. It may be a disaster! The cool thing is that I'll learn from it and get it right on my own.

My palate and my experience may have led me in a direction that is completely different than your's. For example, ethnic cooking experience with Asian or Indian food may have led you to some interesting herbs that I am not familiar with. What I am saying is that, for the most part, there are no wrong or right answers here. Your imagination and your personal taste are the limit.

You can see that the more techniques you have at your fingertips, the more liberty you have with being creative. It's a good idea to study and practice the basics of baking, braising, poaching, roasting, and grilling. Once you know those basics, you can begin honing in on specialties like dough, pastas, forced meats, etc...I encourage you to shed your fears and experiment with your own recipes.