How to change a recipe

And how not to. I get requests from people for recipes. Usually, but not always, they are for dishes that the requestor has eaten at our apartment. Often, I get a call a week, maybe two weeks or more later that begins something like "Remember that recipe I got from you? Well, I made it and it didn't work. Did you leave something out?"

Now, yes,there are stories of cooks who leave out a "critical ingredient" or "accidently" change quantities of ingredients in a recipe so that their "god like " status will remain. I am not one of them. Really. I want everyone to cook, because, amongst other things, I want people to cook for me. So when I hear a recipe didn't work, I want to know why. Almost ALWAYS, the discussion goes something like this:

"Well, yeah, I made it as you wrote it, except I made a few changes." That's when I begin to roll my eyes. "You said to use a cup of heavy cream. I didn't have heavy cream, so I used skim milk." Okay, now we're getting to the bottom of this. "And I don't like cashews, so I used sunflower seeds."

Yeah, I can see how you'd get them mixed up. But THIS one - yes, THIS one, is my favorite

"You made it with pork, and I have a vegetarian friend, so I made it with tofu."


You think I make this stuff up? I wish.

I don't think ANYONE should be a slave to a recipe, but what I DO think is that you have to understand a recipe before you start changing it, and you also have to expect that changes will make a dish different. Sometimes better, sometimes not, but always different. For example, if you are changing a recipe for eggplant parmagiana by using those monstrous zucchini that grow to be bigger than eggplant, you have to understand that zucchini have more water in them, and you will have a wetter dish unless you do something to account for it. Or, if you're going to substitute chicken for pork in a dish that calls for a smoked chop or bacon or something like that, you are going to lose that saltiness and that smokiness, and you'd be best off doing something like putting in a dried chipotle to get it back. Even on the level of an ingredient like vinegar, changing from white wine to red wine to balsamic will make very distinct changes. Try this: make three small amounts of salad dressing exactly the same way, but change the vinegar. Or, on a somewhat different level, make three ham and cheese sandwiches and change the cheese.

Deciding what and when to change a recipe depends on a lot of things, and again, knowing ingredients helps and is in fact essential.

Last night, I modified a recipe that I have given in this blog, WAY back in November: it is a recipe from Zuni Cafe', involving quail, sausage, and grapes. It's a fantastic dish, but in July, the only grapes you can get are from Chile or South Africa, and I will NOT have that in the house. The recipe also calls for fennel seeds, and that's fine, we have them around, but fennel seeds remind me of autumn. Also, the fennel makes sense if you are using a sausage that has fennel seeds in it. In this case, I had chorizo, but not fennel sausage.

And, what I did was I tossed the idea out to my friends David and Keith, who were coming over to dinner , to make modifications. And you know, "out of the mouths of babes." These two guys are sort of my "students" in the kitchen, and they do me proud. David came back with suggesting currants or plums, and Keith came back with the idea of prunes. All of the suggestions are brilliant. I was working along the lines of apricots and peaches, but their ideas were better. As it happens, currants had just come into season, but I wasn't going to get to the market before we had dinner. Plums were just in season too, so I went with them, since they were fresh, and had a bit of tartness to them, something I associate with grapes.

I know from cooking plums that they break down very quickly in cooking, and so we would get a saucier dish, without the "bulk" that the grapes give. BUT... there was fresh fennel in the fridge.

So now you see how the dish is developing. There was one, last quirk. I make the dish with whole quail. When I defrosted my quail, I found that they were boned quail. What that meant is that they were going to cook faster than the whole quail I was used to, but that was something we could handle. Finally, because plums take less time to cook than do whole grapes, we changed the order in which we cooked things.

Yes, this all sounds complex, but it really isn't once you have a handle on things. Here's the recipe as we did it.

Put a quarter cup (that's four whole tablespoons) of olive oil into a big skillet and get it hot. Then add your sausages and brown them on both sides. Don't worry about cooking them through at this point. Remove them, and then add your quail and brown it on both sides (you can use whole quail, it will just take longer to do it at this point). If you see the oil running low, add more (we didn't have that problem). When the quail are browned, then remove them, too.

What you've done now is flavored your oil, so you can move forward with your vegetables and fruits. We added two cups of sliced fennel to the oil, with a bit of salt, and cooked this for about three minutes, just putting a bit of color on the fennel and softening it. Then, in went two cups of cut up plums, just for a minute or two, again to warm them through. Next the quail and sausage went back in, the heat went to low, and a cover went on the pot. If we were using whole quail, we would have put them in first, and cooked it for five or six minutes before adding sausage and cooking for another six. But with the boned babies, everything went in together, for a total of six minutes.

When we were done, we had a very rich, thick, complex sauce of plums and fennel that we spooned over the sausage and quail, and had rather a nice dinner that said "mid summer" instead of autumn, and one that we'll make again.

And I'm saving the idea of the prunes. You know, they may very well replace the grapes in the winter. And if I do that, I will name the dish after Keith, since it IS his recipe.

Thanks guys. "Don't try to keep up,just try to keep open." Yup, my motto worked here.