Picking apart a quote

"The reality is that the best way to become a better cook is through failure, and learning from it to tweak the dish for next time. If you are going to take chances in life, cooking at home should be one of them. There's no feeling in the world like the one that comes from making something delicious by pure instinct - like you stepped up to the podium without writing a speech and delivered the monologue of a lifetime."

David Chang

I confess I almost am tempted to say - "if only..." And I know that the above quote - just a short way into the book I spoke about a couple of days ago - is, some would say, rather corny. I also know that I have talked about the three main ideas covered there before - probably over and over. But I'm feeling philosophical, I want to get this book out of my way and I lack any more creative inspiration.

"The best way to become a better cook is through failure" Well a better anything really, including a better person. It is, however, particularly pertinent to cooking - or any practical skill that we might be engaged in, from plumbing to quilting and anything in between.

An example that Chang gave to someone writing an article about mistakes made by various celebrity chefs was a story of when he was working at an Izayaka (an informal Japanese restaurant or tavern) in Japan back in 2003, which I imagine is early in his cooking career:

"He was not familiar with any of the knives in that kitchen except for the cleaver, and even that only marginally. Nevertheless, his colleagues urged him to use it as a sort of right of passage. Things did not go well. Chang cut off the tip of his finger pretty seriously while making himself the butt of the joke for the rest of the staff"

For many of us that might have been the end of the journey into a career in cooking. But no - he persevered - this time using his own knives, and although he still occasionally cuts himself a bit - what chef doesn't - he at least knows how to handle knives.

Failure is a huge thing. I think it is probably the minority who are able to deal creatively with failure and turn it into success. Even on the tiny scale of home cooking, if you have a series of cooking failures - whether from a recipe - choosing the wrong one, not reading it properly, forgetting to check the oven and so on - or from something you have made up yourself which just didn't work - it can be very disheartening. Particularly if you have a series of failures. We often give up. So maybe the lesson here is not so much to learn how to do whatever the wrong thing was, right next time, but to make sure that you actually do it again.

"learning from the failure to tweak the dish for next time." Also applicable to any other skill, be it as simple as not adding as much salt, or using a different colour thread, or as complicated as a reassessment of the whole thing. Professional cooks, of course, do this all the time. That's what test kitchens are for. That's why it takes Ixta Belfrage a year to create a recipe that she is satisfied with. For the home cook - well he's talking about tweaking the dish so he is implying that this is something that you yourself have created. And if you've created it it's probably because of a fridge raid meal, which is unlikely to ever be repeated, because what is in the fridge is never the same.

Mind you if it is a generic kind of dish that you make from various leftovers - an omelette, a soup, a risotto, a stir fry, a quiche - I guess there are things to do with the overall technique that you do learn as you go along. You learn that tomatoes if just added to the eggs for an omelette will make it watery, so you either have to get rid of the wateriness some way - roasting or frying hard - or just float them on top, juice side up, at the end before putting your omelette under the grill - or leave them out. I'm talking of a rustic frittata kind of omelette here, not a beautiful omelette aux fines herbes. As David Chang says:

"make sure you know why you made that mistake; and, let’s not make it again … just don’t make them the second or third time around.”

Alas we home cooks usually do, because we may not quite understand the full ins and outs of the mistake, or how to fix it.

"If you are going to take chances in life ..." I've left out the bit about cooking being one of them because for most of us cooking is not a choice. Somebody has to do it. You can't rely on take-away all the time - although ... (I did read an article about this the other day, so maybe it's another topic). No it's the taking chances in life - and I do note that he begins that sentence with 'If'. Which is important - at least in the sense that he means there. We all take chances every day of course - every time we walk down the street or get into our car ... but I think what he really means is taking deliberate chances. At least that is what I immediately thought. I suppose it takes a certain amount of bravery to take a meaningful chance in your life - a career change, a relationship, a change of location ... And where does gambling come into that? After all taking a chance is really a synonym for gambling in a way, is it not? Taking a chance, can after all, be disastrous - which I guess takes us back to the learning from our mistakes.

"There's no feeling in the world like the one that comes from making something delicious by pure instinct - like you stepped up to the podium without writing a speech and delivered the monologue of a lifetime."

Well unlike David Chang most of us are not going to get the podium feeling any time soon -probably not at all. However, he is right about - "There's no feeling in the world like the one that comes from making something delicious by pure instinct."

Last night I felt a bit like that. I had made a kind of long sausage roll from leftovers of Yotam Ottolenghi's Cheeseball lemon rice with chilli butter combined with the leftover filling from his Potato, cheese and chermoula hand pies plus a bit of extra feta and yoghurt. And it was indeed pretty delicious. It so brilliantly reminded me of a quote from Felicity Cloake: "Just about anything is better wrapped in pastry". And that's more or less what David said, saying that the original cheeseball rice had been somewhat bland, but that this was truly delicious. I kept to myself that I think the extra deliciousness came from the leftover hand pies filling. What really made me feel great however, was his praise. He's rather difficult to please. A small success in a small life.

All of the above sounds like a fan letter to David Chang, about whom I know very little really, and whose food - at least in his book Cooking at Home was not particularly enticing to me. And yes, that quote is somewhat unoriginal - corny even, but it made me think for a moment and that's always a good thing isn't it? I just hope I won't make any mistakes with my lunch tomorrow. After all I'm taking chances on all three recipes. And Woolworths did have better, larger fennel - same high price though. But I did buy one.

YEARS GONE BY

February 5

2025 - Nothing

2024 - Iles flottantes

2023 - Eggs - what's in a name?

2022 - Kitchen satisfactions

2021 - Missing

2020 - Lucky dip - a surprise author

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Tin foil or aluminium foil?

2017 - Nothing