25 January 2023 Wednesday
The Tip for Meal Preparation: Standard Recipes
The article of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Dogan, Deputy dean of Istanbul Gelisim University (IGU), Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) and lecturer of the Department of Gastronomy and Culinary Arts, was published in the Journal of Food Taste with the title "The Trick of Cooking: Standard Recipes".
If you ask me what is the most important element in food preparation. First of all, I can say that it is a recipe. We call these prescriptions standard recipes.
There have been many times when we wanted to make a new dish and searched for its recipe. For this purpose, we search for recipes from the internet and cookbooks. And we see that there are dozens of different recipes before us. How will we find the best and most suitable one among them? I think this is our biggest problem.
Let's think about it this way. No matter how careful we are while preparing food, there have been times when you have noticed that we have added more or less salt when we are sitting at the table. Sometimes the food
we cook is very delicious, and sometimes we cannot achieve the taste we want.
“All these problems actually have a solution”
As I said at the beginning, these are standard recipes. Now what is the standard recipe for you? I want to talk a little bit about how it is created and how we keep it going.
Before we start preparing food, we first need to consider measuring techniques and standards in order to create the right recipe. Let's always have units of measure and use them. While we are adding ingredients with a large spoon today, let's not do it with a smaller spoon tomorrow. Generally speaking, when creating and preparing a standard recipe for the first time, the best way to determine the right amount is to add the ingredients little by little and weigh them each time. Standard recipes specify the type and quantity of each ingredient and equipment, preparation and cooking processes, and portion size and quantity.
To consistently achieve the same delicious results, the amount of ingredients to go into each plate must be accurately measured. There are different ways to measure materials, and it is important to record such measurements in a notebook or, nowadays, on the phone.
“Standard recipes are not often found on the Internet or in books.”
These are prescriptions customized by the person for a particular procedure. While creating our standard recipes in our kitchen, it is beneficial to start with low and small scales and portions. The purpose of this is to set up the food quality and taste correctly. Also, to measure correctly is to know how to go from kilogram to gram or from cup to spoon.
Measuring ingredients requires basic math operations such as calculating the proportions of ingredients, transforming the recipe, reconstructing and portioning a recipe for several servings, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Incorrect measurement of ingredients is one of the main factors determining the success or failure of a recipe. Miscalculation can cause our meal to fail. Therefore, it is significant to know the basic mathematical operations well.
“Measurements in the kitchen can be made in three ways”
These are weight, volume and count. Sometimes we want to develop a standard recipe from a foreign website. We also see that the terms ounce or pound are before us instead of grams. It is necessary to convert them to grams correctly. We commonly use scales to weigh ingredients in kitchens, as weight is often the most accurate form of measurement.
“The kitchen uses two types of measurement”
One of them is qualitative observations. The other, as we all know, is quantitative, that is, numerical measurements. Qualitative observations are to observe and describe the changing characteristics of food during meal preparation. We do this with our five senses. For instance, observing changes in color when preparing caramelized onions or comparing the texture of foods prepared with different types of starch includes qualitative observations.
As a result, standard recipes for delicious meals that we will prepare in the kitchen should be prepared with correct and appropriate measurements and a few small trials, and this should be recorded and continued.
Stay well…
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