Why Failure Is a Useful Kitchen Tool
It seems like home cooks are under a lot of pressure these days. It is not enough to feed his family chicken breasts – you need to feed them organic, quite juicy chicken breasts,cooked on the free-range and serve with vegetables,prepared from carefully selected kitchen waste . This perfectionist mindset permeates food writing and home cooking culture, where everyone strives to produce the perfect meal, night after night.
Basically, there is nothing wrong with striving to produce good or even flawless work, but an obsession with perfection can make a person fearful of failure, and failure is an extremely useful tool, especially in the kitchen. If you accept failure, you can cook better at home, making you not only more relaxed in the kitchen, but also more adventurous. To be honest, I am very scared of failure – just ask my boyfriend about the Great Undercooked Cinnamon Rolls Incident in 2017 – but it helps to remember the positive impact of failure on kitchen skills.
Failure is memorable
Two unsuccessful attempts at baking — and they are almost always baked — stand out in my memory as particularly instructive. The first one happened when I tried to bake pumpkin bread for a group of 11 many times back over Thanksgiving. I was 10 years old, I really wanted to, and I quickly skimmed the recipe instead of reading it in full. As a result, I added two tablespoons of baking soda to the orange batter, not two teaspoons, and the resulting bread was inedible and soapy. I’m pretty sure I was crying – because I was a very proud teenager – but that day I learned to read the recipe carefully and more than once . The painful teenage confusion associated with this incident is gone, but the lesson is not, and I bake better for that.
The second memorable failure occurred when I (drunk) tried to guess how much sugar should be in a batch of cakes. I did not guess. Those cakes suck, and I learned that drunk baking may not be a fantastic success.
Failure Fights Fear
There are tons of great, thoroughly tested recipes, both in cookbooks and on the Internet, and it can be tempting to follow them exactly , never deviating from a good proven word or adding your own flavor. After all, if you know that a certain recipe makes food that is pleasant to eat, why would you mess with it and perhaps make food that is not so fun to eat? I’ll tell you why, my friends – you tinker with it to learn .
The fear of failing yourself and your loved ones by cooking and serving mediocre food can keep you from experimenting, which prevents you from growing as a cook. Knowing that it’s not tasty together is just as important as knowing that it’s delicious together, and I developed a very good sense of flavor by putting some highly questionable food combinations in my mouth.
Also, remember that you are feeding your family and this is very important. They can tolerate one night of eating a slightly bland chicken or an over-chewy steak. If something really bad happens, order a pizza. Nobody ever complained about the impromptu pizza night. (And if they do complain, they’ll make themselves a sandwich.)
Improvising in the kitchen can help you better understand why certain recipes work so well and play around with flavor combinations that you would never have encountered if you adhered to the recipe strictly every time. (The only area of cooking I wouldn’t improvise is baking; that shit is chemistry.)
Failure can be friendly
Although I have a degree in chemistry, I was not originally interested in cooking in the very precise field of molecular gastronomy. While science definitely has a place in the kitchen, I first started cooking as a way to escape the stress of the lab and physical chemistry lessons that were slowly but surely draining my will to exist. Armed with the beautiful Nigella Lawson’s early books, I prepared my way to a quieter place, knowing that my GPA would stay the same no matter how the batch of molten lava cakes came out. (Also, I would eat chocolate cake in some form, whether they froze correctly or not, which is always comforting.)
Your kitchen should be a warm and cozy place. It should be a safe place, a place where you can freely test recipes, experiment with flavors, and screw up from time to time. If you don’t send photos of your creations to Gordon Ramsay – why are you doing this? – no one will know what is going on there, except for the people you choose to feed your creations to. Plus, failure is fun and it helps tell great stories. So push yourself outside your comfort zone, mix weird things together, and relax, dude. It’s just food; It won’t last that long with you anyway.