Cookaholics Bulletin Board

If anybody is unsure about the link, it's a video from Jaques Pepin about not following recipes slavishly.

Sorry about the link. Usually I get the youtube link, not the facebook one. I thought it was good as he articulated how a recipe would never turn out exactly the same every time, despite our efforts. Deb

Deb,

I couldn't find the segment on Youtube either, or I would have posted it.

Nix that. I was able to view it but not repost.

It does highlight what the difference is between a Pepin recipe and say a CI recipe. Pepin will give you a seemingly simple sounding recipe that actually requires a fair bit of judgement and skill to execute. CI probably wouldn't give you that recipe at all, but if they did, they would add a lot of steps and procedures so that slavishly following the recipe will still give a decent or good result. Once you make enough CI recipes, you will probably start wondering WTH with this people and their zillion steps, but with out it you end up with Pepin, and having to adjust on the fly. The Pepin method ultimately will be faster and "easier" (disregarding skill), and possibly be able to make/produce things they CI won't be able to, but far more likely to have a failure.

And then you have Keller, which has more steps then the CI one and every step requiring the skill of Pepin...

Added: Also, I'd like to complain that even if you had that recipe for Pepin's pears, what are the odds they'd give you the fix paths? No, they wouldn't tell you to watch out for ripe pears, pull em early and finish separately; they would write it as if it went according to plan every time. Recipes really need to give more "how to tell how its going" and "how to remedy" instructions.

Paul,

I also really appreciate a recipe which has "failure modes". A good early example of this was the 70's classic Laurel's Bread Book; it had a whole chapter, titled "How to slice a brick" about ways bread can go wrong and what to do about it.