Last week I made baked macaroni and cheese with bacon. I largely followed Alton Brown's recipe although I added in some aged gouda and the bacon. The result was, to me, incredibly underwhelming. The dish lacked any sort of "pop", even with the its copious amounts of cheese and cream. It was dry, and with the exception of the occasional burst of bacon flavor, gave one little desire to dive into the next bite.
What went wrong? I don't know, in fact I don't really think anything went outright wrong. It just simply wasn't what I'd expected. This is a cooking lesson that I've been slow to learn: don't put a G.I. Joe Death Grip on a preconceived expectation of the end results. That's not to say that you shouldn't have some plan, or vision of the completed dish both in regard to taste and presentation. That's good, it's necessary. However focusing too hard on that idyllic result both stresses me the fuck out, and causes me to ignore experimental paths that the dish is screaming at me to follow.
I think this is one of the reasons cooking by recipe is such a downer for me. Let's look at this baked mac 'n cheese again. I really didn't read over the process prior to diving in. It was a rushed production. I was reading the next step and executing it simultaneously. Never really stepping back and seeing the process as a whole. Like a human's view of time vs. a tralfamadorian's... I didn't flow with it, I robotically executed and somewhere along the way that lack of complete understanding, the lack of passion, ultimately came through and fucked everything up.
In other words, I was cooking like this:
No comments:
Post a Comment