Messing with your recipes -- Tell your stories

[JustEstelle]

Speaking of being a "dump cook"  . . . I have a recipe for pound cake that was passed down from my grandmother, who used to bake hers in a wood-burning stove.  The batter is basically eggs, butter, flour, sugar and vanilla.  The trick is in how the ingredients are put together - butter and sugar creamed properly, eggs added one at a time and the batter beaten well after each addition, etc.  The result is a moist, dense cake that is out of this world.  It's especially good with fresh fruit, such as sliced strawberries or peaches in season.

My mother used to share the recipe with people who claimed that she must have left out an ingredient or something, as their attempt at the recipe just didn't turn out right.  Invariably, when Mom would ask them how they mixed the ingredients, they would just dump everything into a bowl and mix it up.      No wonder it came out a mess.  I made the cake (actually, two recipes of it) to take to a charity cake auction a few years ago.  One was for tasting and the other was to sell.  My whole cake brought $40, and the left-overs of the "tasting" cake sold for $25.  A couple of people actually got into a bidding war!  My grandmother would be proud!

[Kitty Hawk]

If someone put sour cream on my baked potato, I would either put it aside and not eat it, or scrape every bit of the sour cream off as I could, and as ostentatiously as I could (I know, not e-hell approved).

I am also a dump cook to a certain extent.  Someone once asked me for my vegetable soup recipe, and my answer was something like, first you see what vegetables you have on hand and then you throw them in the soup pot.....

[blarg314]

I had a roommate once who was an okay plain cook - he'd saute meat and vegetables, boil vegetables, cook potatoes, and so on. One day he asked me for a recipe for a cake, as he wanted to take one to a potluck.

I dug up a very simple one bowl cake recipe - no beating the egg whites, or mixing things separately. Then I went out to run errands. When I came back I found out that he had been out of milk - so he used yoghurt. That was kind of sour, so he added mashed bananas. And there may have been one or two other things.   What he got out of the oven was not, technically, cake, it was more of a sour baked custard.

I also find the ratings on on-line recipes amusing, but I do understand the comments. When I look at on-line recipes I almost never follow them exactly.  I'm generally looking for the general ingredients and amounts for a dish, and then I wing it from there.   Quite often I *have* to improvise based on the availability of ingredients. For example, I can get whole milk and whipping cream but nothing in between, and the brown sugar is a different texture and taste than what I grew up with, and I can easily find walnuts and cashews, but not hazelnuts or pecans.

I've occasionally explained to people that baking is much more like chemistry than ordinary cooking. You can substitute in some cases, but you need to know what effect it will have not just on taste, but the chemical reactions.

[Clara Bow]

I am absolutely.horrified some people take it upon themselves to add ingredients to someone's dish - like the bottle of ketchup in the pot of chili.  Who on earth does that?  My jaw-drop-o-meter is boinging above high!

I take my chili seriously and putting ketchup in it qualifies as a mortal sin in my book. YUCK!!

[Kess]

I have to adapt a lot of recipes due to a digestive disorder (normally lowering the fat, substituting dairy for non-dairy, etc) but I'd never pass them off as someone else's recipe.  I might say, "Oh, Soandso gave me her recipe and then, unfortunately, I had to doctor it so I could eat it  .  It's not as good as the original, but I can eat more than a teaspoonful of mine without dying!" to people who know about my health issues, or to someone who doesn't know about them I might say it's a specially adapted version of someone else's recipe due to food tolerance issues.  It's amazing how much some recipes can be altered and still turn out fine, when some others the slightest change ruins the whole thing.  I found an IBS-friendly banana cake recipe once that was described as "totally foolproof", and it is!  You can leave out some ingredients, substitute others, etc, and it still works.  I don't know how, but it does.  I also have an IBS-friendly brownie recipe that was pre-adapted, but can't be messed with by amatuers such as me except (and ONLY!) to leave out the coffee - whoever did the initial substitutions must have been a good cook.

I think if you hear on the grapevine that someone is insulting your recipe when it's not your recipe anymore since all the changes they made, the only tack is to mention that they made changes.  As a PP said, people should twig that when you make it it works and put the discrepancy down to the relative skill levels of the cooks.

I can't understand what goes through the mind of people who add to a whole dish rather than seasoning/whatever their own portion.  Does it not occur to them that others might not like what they do, like when my little dog brings me his toy to throw when I'm ill (me throwing his toy makes him feel good, so it must make me feel better too)?  Or do they not care, or what?

[mechtilde]

  I have a stupid question? which relates to the brownies from heaven is heavy cream = heavy whipping cream  and is there a double cream/single cream US equivalent?

I'm guessing double cream or thickened cream.  I personally wouldn't use whipping cream.  But shall we both give it a go and see what happens?

Single cream is tin and used for pouring. It won't whip. Whipping cream is slightly thicker and will whip, but can also be used for pouring. Double cream is very thick, makes very thick whipped cream, and can be used for pouring if you really want to- but it has a very thick consistency indeed. I've always understood that double cream and heavy cream were the same.

[ZaftigWife]

I'm trying to find a copy of a funny poem about this...  it's in one of my zillions of cookbooks.  Lemme see if I can locate it...

Edited:  Found it! 

This was printed in a spiral-bound cookbook that my family's church put out.  It says "Author unknown," but I'll try to find an attribution if there is one.  Here goes:

I didn't have potatoes
So I substituted rice
I didn't have paprika
So I used another spice
I didn't have tomato sauce
I used tomato paste
The whole can, not a half can
As I don't believe in waste
A friend gave me the recipe
She said you couldn't beat it
There must be something wrong with HER
I couldn't even eat it!

Oh, Saphie, thank you SO MUCH for sharing that!  I read that poem when I was a kid - I think in Reader's Digest - and I could only remember the first two lines.  I never could find it, not even with Google, and it was driving me crazy!

[weeblewobble]

I think adding/eating/excessively commenting on things when you're doing the cooking is horribly rude. 

However, if you gave someone a recipe and they decided not to follow it exactly, I don't see why that any of your business?

I have given out a recipe, only to have that person cook the recipe, then add say, pumpkin spice instead of cinnamon, or butter-flavoring and shortening instead of butter or wild rice instead of macaroni noodles.  And when it turns out badly, the improvisor will know its bad and say, "Oh, well, it's weeble's recipe!" Like it's my fault it turned out badly.

[Bob Ducca]

Question: for recipe tweakers, at what point does it become "your" recipe?  I do a lot of recipe tweaking to decrease fat/carbs and increase protein, but I somehow feel dishonest claiming a recipe as "mine" unless I've changed it substantially.  On the other hand, I agree that changing ingredients and methods really doesn't make it that person's recipe anymore, so crediting it to that person might not be a kindness.

[LadyJaneinMD]

PMS Brownies or The Brownies That Will Cure Anything

Oh, these look *good*.  I see some shopping in my future.   And baking. 
Thanks for sharing the recipe.

[Karmelita]

tnpenguin, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou

(passes out)

Ditto.

[MariaE]

tnpenguin, that sound delicious. Hope you don't mind a quick question? All those different forms of chocolate is a bit of a mystery to me as we don't tend to differentiate between semi-dark, dark and unsweetened (not to mention that I've ever even heard of German chocolate before - intriguing!) - we tend to label by percentage of cocoa instead - i.e. 70% is unsweetened, 60% is dark, 50% is semi-dark etc. -- does that sound about right to you?

And just what is German chocolate? I'm going nuts here!

[tnpenguinbaby]

Thank you tnpenguin for the brownies, YUM!!!

Question because I'm a tad confused.  Is there a 12 oz package of choc. chips missing from the ingredient list?  Because you discuss using the 12 oz of chips in the directions but I only see mention of chips in that you may use them for the 6 oz of semi sweet chocolate which I though was to be melted along with the rest of the chocolates?

Or am I totally missing something?

Thanks again!

No, that's from my last tweak in the recipe - thanks for catching that!  Should be 6 oz throughout.  I'll go back and edit.

[tnpenguinbaby]

  I have a stupid question? which relates to the brownies from heaven is heavy cream = heavy whipping cream  and is there a double cream/single cream US equivalent?

I'm guessing double cream or thickened cream.  I personally wouldn't use whipping cream.  But shall we both give it a go and see what happens?

Whats the worst that could happen and whatever happens we can blame tnpenguinbaby 

An excellent point!   

  
I did read online where you can make double cream if you don't have any.  Seeing as it basically involves making homemade creme fraiche and takes 24 hours......not happening!  Although, dang it, it would really be good in the recipe.......................

[Bethalize]

  I have a stupid question? which relates to the brownies from heaven is heavy cream = heavy whipping cream  and is there a double cream/single cream US equivalent?

It's a very good question. USA heavy cream is 36% fat. UK whipping cream is 35%. UK double cream is 48%. UK single cream is 18%. I'd replace "heavy cream" with UK whipping cream. Half and half (12%) isn't AFAIK freely available in the UK but you can make your own 11% substitute by mixing full fat milk (4%) with single cream in equal measures.  

I can't believe the US dairy industry hasn't cottened on to double cream yet!