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Inspired by the cooking hacks discussion, I have a question for people: how do you use recipes? If I want to cook something in particular, I will usually find a recipe for what I want to try, preferably by someone who will have tested their recipe to destruction and have made it foolproof, however didactic and prescriptive they may well be (Hello, Delia!). If this works well, I will *then* start mucking with the recipe to adapt it (if necessary) to my palate. If I just want to make 'tasty dish with ingredients x', I will use my imagination and my knowledge of technique to see what I come up with. Obviously, there are certain areas of cookery that are more resistant to mucking about and need precise cooking, eg. patisserie or sourdough bread (two examples from my experience). Here a precise recipe and a knowledge of what particular failure modes mean are most useful to me. Any comments? -Jakob -- "There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."--Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800. I am jakob dot whitfield at gmail dot com
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