Building Your Own Secret Recipes

How You Only Need Basic Ingredients to Create Inspiring Dishes

In Italian cooking, the secret is to use less and focus on the key ingredient. If you are making a pizza, your dough should be the star. Making a dish like Osso Bucco, you use a braising technique, a form of moist heat cookery. In this dish, Osso Bucco, you use veal shanks. Your veal shank should be extraordinary.

In American, we like to overpower things with our beliefs and visions. So in the case of a pizza, the dough is an afterthought. Our goal is to dump as much cheese, sauce, and ingredients on a piece of cooked bread. The goal should be to not overwhelm the dish. It is a dance of culinary harmony.

Anything You Can Do, I Can’t Do Better

There is only one you. No one can do it like you. We get inspirations and techniques from watching and training with others, but ultimately your creativeness has to stem from your insides, your experiences. Let me make a distinction. There may be master chefs that are better than you and more skilled but they cannot do things how you would do it. Owning your abilities is the first step in finding your destiny.

Take something as simple as an egg. There are multiple ways to get that perfect hard-cooked, not boiled, egg. People say hard-boiled but it’s kind of a misnomer. Yes, the water is boiling, so is it okay to call it hard-boiled? Well, I guess, but the water is boiling not the egg. I know, semantics! You say tomato. I say rutabaga.

My best technique is as follows:

1. Place eggs in sauce pot covered with cold water.
2. Bring to a boil, add 1 teaspoon salt, iodized if you must, but kosher salt is the best for pretty much everything.
3. Let water softly bubble for 10 minutes.
4. Pull off heat. Let sit for 2–3 minutes.
5. Drain water, leaving, some of the water in the pot.
6. Cover with ice for at least 10 minutes. Try to dump ice around eggs as the impact will crack the eggs.
7. Strike eggs on a hard surface and then roll them back and forth. Be careful not to smush them. The egg hasn’t done anything to you!
8. This should allow you to peel the egg in large pieces.

This might take you a few tries. I’m with you. There is nothing more frustrating than having all of the egg stick to the shell or trying to pick off tiny pieces while all of the shells and bits of eggs fly around your kitchen.

Creating Your Own Recipes

We all have gifts. Some are more accessible and available. Others have to be dug out or discovered. All gifts must be cultivated. I have a natural interest and a tendency to creating food. I studied at a Culinary Academy, but I had my hands in pots and pans long before I pursued it as a career.

My first food experience I can remember is watching the original Zoom television program as a kid and seeing them making a cake or something on the screen. I became inspired. I thought I want to make a cake too. I dug in the cupboard, reaching over while standing on a step stool, and started grabbing things out of the pantry.

I settled on peanut butter. It felt right. Everybody loves peanut butter. Here’s where it started to run amok. I also grabbed Worcestershire, vinegar, and some mustard and stepped down from the stool. With all my clever ingredients placed on the table, I opened a heavy metal drawer. I grabbed a huge wooden spoon and got out a large mixing bowl.

I rushed to find my dad and showcase my creation. Luckily, he only made us eat a few bites. Blechh. I found out the hard way that enthusiasm alone does not make a dish edible. You must have some training. Little did I know that this would set me on a lifetime journey of cooking.

Mastery of the ingredients

You can take the same five ingredients, give them to five different cooks, and you will get five different dishes. The reason being that each individual has experienced their world exclusively. I call it cooking with the soul. Like you can hear the food speaking to you, you can taste what somebody has been experiencing or experienced by how their food turns out.

Are they confident? Impatient? Precise? Were they invested in the dish? Did they even bother to taste it and notice that salt was used instead of sugar? I did that once by accident. It cost me in a cooking contest.

More is not better unless more is how your thoughts and dishes come together. Techniques and your adjustments are factors that make that change.

Examples of recipe adjustments

1. Salt placement and amount. Seasoning a steak from different heights will concentrate the flavors and effect the sear.
2. The type of acid you use. Lemon, lime, vinegar, wine. All of these impart flavor as well as accentuating your base flavors. Too much and your dish is ruined. Too little and your dish falls flat.
3. Fresh versus dry herbs. They both have their place. Dry has a more concentrated depth. Fresh is more vibrant.

The line through in this story is that I used trial and error, sometimes lots of error, to get my basic style. I was always cooking with a passion and love for myself and others. Each time I put my spin on dishes and it became a part of me and an extension of my purpose as a being.

You can mimic all day but your cells are different than mine. We have the same basic gear but as we grow from little zygotes, we morph into who we are by building our secret recipes. Understanding the universal rules of things are how we build or own style. There is no magic potion or wand that makes you able to create special dishes, only you and your experiences. Good luck and good cooking.

Josh Kiev is an actor, chef, and has yet to reproduce his famous peanut butter and vinegar cake.

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