I believe the true secret of successful cooking lies not in ingredients and recipes, but rather in experience and practice.
And having made such a sweeping generalisation, let me backtrack a little to explain how this topic came up in conversation yesterday.
Our dear friend Craig is an extremely talented baker. He popped in for a meal last night, and brought with him a pear and berry galette that he’d “thrown” together that afternoon. The pastry in the tart was fabulous – flaky, crisp and delicious. I’ve never been able to make anything like it. Craig explained that it was the simplest of recipes, comprising only flour, butter and water.
Now, I can take flour, butter and water and end up with a perfectly acceptable shortcrust pastry, but I have no idea how to make pastry that flakes away in sheets. Craig, on the other hand, has spent countless hours perfecting his craft, and can turn exactly the same ingredients into something completely different.
My elderly Hungarian neighbour is another great example – her vanilla kifli recipe has only a handful of ingredients, but years of experience and literally hundreds of batches have given her the necessary skill to produce cookies that are unparalleled. I’ve had the benefit of her expertise, which has allowed me to circumvent a decade or so of practice, but even after a couple of years of baking her recipe, I still can’t touch her offerings, which are known up and down our street as “June bikkies”.
The 21st century moves so rapidly that we’ve lost the patience to persevere. We want to be instantly good at all things, including cooking. We want recipes that will work perfectly each and every time – when they don’t, we’re inclined to dismiss them as faulty, or poorly written. Some skills, though, can only be attained through trial and error – everyone will burn caramel the first few times they try to make it, until they’ve learnt to recognise the exact shade the melted sugar turns just before it needs to come off the heat.
Modern society is intolerant of failure. It’s viewed with derision and contempt, rather than as the necessary learning process that it actually is. We forget that nearly every task becomes easy with sufficient practice, and every failure brings with it new knowledge. To never fail is to never improve.
We believe that we should celebrate our failures, because each and every one of them offers an opportunity for growth – they’re all stepping stones towards the final goal.
Let me give you a personal example – our very first loaves of sourdough bread were difficult to make and barely edible – we watched the clock to ensure the exact proving time, fussed about the hydration of the dough and measured the ingredients down to the last gram.
Now, after five years of weekly breadmaking, the process has become automatic – I mix together flour, water and starter in the morning, ignore it all day, and come back late in the afternoon to shape and bake it. I know instinctively when the dough is ready, and can intuitively adjust hydration levels and oven temperatures to suit fluctuations in flour quality and the responsiveness of my starter.
Along the way, I’ve had some spectacular disasters, with the occasional loaf that even the chickens wouldn’t eat (thankfully, the worms would). And whilst I’ve been disappointed when things have gone pear-shaped, I’ve always been grateful for the lessons learnt as a result of the stuff-ups. Without them, it’s unlikely my breadmaking would have progressed beyond its initial stages.
So, let me encourage you not to be disheartened when things don’t go exactly as planned in the kitchen. There is nothing “wrong” with what you’re doing – it really is just part of the learning process. You’re unlikely to repeat the same mistakes (although you’ll possibly make new ones), and eventually you’ll develop such mastery over your craft that, like Craig and June, you’ll be able to turn out magnificent creations on a whim!
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
I agree with you 100%
Thanks Norma! :)
Are we intolerant of failure? I think homo sapiens is a successful species because she learns and adapts to changes in her environment and her experiences, ‘failure’ is an intrinsic part of ‘success’. Wish I could make pastry like Craig too :)
Of course, you are right on the grand scale, as a species we do adapt and learn, but I think modern society, and particularly some Western and Asian cultures, are brutally hard on those who fail to reach the standards set by the collective. But now we’re going off on a tangent, and that’s probably a discussion best carried out over dinner with a glass or two of wine.. ;-)
Celia, this post is pure wisdom!
so true! We want to be rewarded fast, right now, no delays, no extra effort. It’s simply wrong, and naive.
great post!
Thanks Sally! I’m sure that as someone who spent years studying for her doctorate, you understand exactly where I’m coming from! :)
Celia, great post! When I first read your opening sentence, I was wanting to throw in my usual argument that the freshness and quality of ingredients is imperative (which I do believe is so). However, having fully read your piece, I must say I agree with you completely!
No one can make crumbed chicken, carnival doughnuts, strudel dough, Gerbeaud slice and many other delicious, good things (maybe even Kifli) like my Hungarian mother, who, before she died, had cooked them for 60 plus years!
Perhaps your reasoning is why my daughter (26) complains she can never get the texture of Nokedli right for her Chicken Paprika, the way I do (I’ve been making it since I was about 13, I’m now 53). Like you and your loaves, the process is automatic. I know exactly how the dough should look and feel, I don’t need the recipe. Likewise with the paprikas.
Trial and error, practice makes perfect and all that. And I’d love to make pastry just like your friend too.
Lizzy, I rewrote the first line half a dozen times, because like you, I’m obsessed with the quality of my ingredients. But the more I thought about it, the more I really believed that regardless of how good the ingredients were, skill and experience played an even bigger role. I wish you could meet my friend June, she makes a mean Nokedli (even though I’ve never known how to spell it until now!). :)
Celia, I would love to meet June and I bet we would get on like a house on fire! Someday… let’s make sure that happens, I would love to meet you and break bread! xox And I agree about the skill and experience, definitely!
Lizzy, that would be fun! I was telling her about you today.. :)
Excellent post, it does take years to master many things in life, sometimes my daughter asks me for the recipe for something simple like a cheese sauce……I don’t have any exact recipe, I do it by feel!
This fast paced world we live in has a lot to answer for.
Sue, only now do I understand why it was so hard to get recipes out of my mother – she never followed any! :)
You’re correct on so many counts. I’m impatient when my Internet browser doesn’t upload immediately and expect perfection of myself in the kitchen! Pie crusts have humbled me and the recipe done again and again and finally perfected are now my favorites. What a sense of accomplishment that is!
Smidge, I’m sure your pies must be amazing after all that hard work! :)
Celia, I feel so much better after reading your post. You see, I made ciabatta today but it didn’t have any of those nice big holes that ciabatta is supposed to have. I will try again.
Glenda, my only advice with ciabatta is to not think about it too much. I ignore my dough for most of the day, and it always seems to produce an acceptable result. Are you making a sourdough version? Maybe your starter needs some revving up?
Totally right, though I hate failure – I get really frustrated and annoyed when anything to do with food goes wrong, I hate it. But, I do learn and do better next time. This does look wonderful though. Let’s just see how my cake in the oven turns out…
I used to get pretty pissed when my dishes didn’t work when I was in my twenties as well, Nick. Now that I’m an old woman, I just don’t have the energy to get that cross anymore.. ;-)
Haha – old woman indeed. Age is nothing but a number, Celia! My left knee already has problems when I play too much sport :D
This is quite true about most of life, isn’t it?
Relationships come to mind- when we fail, we need to seek forgiveness and try again- it’s all a matter of practice- success and failure.
Thanks for reminding us all of the importance of not giving up.
Heidi, I suspect it’s true of all things in life, as you say. We’ve had some pretty hard knocks in the last few years, but each time something hasn’t worked, we’ve tried to say, “ok, so we’ve eliminated that option, now we can move on..”.
Hi Celia I enjoy reading your very witty posts and after reading this one I remembered something I’d heard many years ago. ‘There is no such thing as a failure in the Kitchen just lack of imagination’.
That’s so true! There’s almost always something that a stuff-up can be turned into! :) Thanks for dropping in to say hi!
I think we are a really impatient generation because of how quickly and instantly everything happens these days. I remember working in an office before my first child was born and letters were written and posted and you waited days for a reply – patiently! Now emails are sent and if you don’t get a reply in a few minutes you’re aggravated/annoyed/disgusted/suspicious etc. Great post Celia xx
Charlie, we really are impatient, aren’t we! Even emails sometimes needed a day or two before a response was expected, but now with smses, we’re annoyed if the reply isn’t instantaneous! :)
Oh mercy i am so good at failure.. it is my friend and especially when it comes to sourdough, i guess i have had a starter for about 9 months now and i still have never made the perfect loaf, however i make another one every week! in between i just make the regular yeast bread that i can make with my eyes closed, never measure and is always good. However this is an excellent piece of writing celia.. everyone should read it.. Now I am off to look up your sourdough recipe again! c
Celi, one thing I learnt the hard way was that not all SD starters are equal. The ones we have are lovely and robust, so they’ll bounce back even after a really long rising time. They’re not all like that though! I’m sure your loaves are getting better all the time.. :)
What wise words Celia. Charlie is right, technology has a lot to answer for. Everyone wants everything instantly. I have been victim to the burnt caramel but my best are the macarons. I have had flat, misshaped, lumpy and now am finally starting to get them right. Practice makes perfect!
Claire, I’m actually a big fan of technology, so long as we can manage to use it as a tool rather than letting it dominate us. I’ve heard macarons are hard, but I’ve never tried making them!
i thoroughly enjoyed reading your post celia and your sentiments resonated with me..i think we all need to be easier on ourselves with regard to ‘failure’ and realise that repeated effort and perseverance often is rewarded even it’s not immediately apparent or earth shatteringly spectacular..
Jane, that’s a really good point, thank you. The good things in life, the ones really worth working for, are often not all that spectacular at all! :)
So very true Celia! We all want instant results and Instant experts. I’m heartened by the resurgence of artisan producers and how they are gaining ground. These are people who have put the time and effort into their craft and have done the hard yards. That’s why their stuff tastes so darn good!
Becca, there really is a groundswell, isn’t there? Particularly amongst the artisan bakers, who are turning out the most magnificent breads and cakes!
Well said Celia and that applies to your entire life not just cooking :)
Thanks Priscilla! :)
So true Celia. And I agree with the comment above that it applies to all aspects of life, not just cooking. Was having much the same conversation about mentoring staff…and parenting…just last night! It took me years (decades?) to be able to cook some of the Indian curries my mum makes. Her recipes, her detailed instructions, observing her cooking….all that and still mine were dreadful. Years later I realised the key ingredient I was missing – patience! How appropriate that for lack of patience I took years to learn to make a good curry!
SG, that’s a great example, because after decades of practice, your curries are some of the best I’ve ever tasted! :)
Oh how trueCelia! last week when my rye sourdough stuck half on and half off the baking stone; ended up a very odd shape.
Elaine, my favourite story of that ilk came from my friend Danielle, who used the warming setting in her oven to prove her dough. She then turned the oven on to preheat without remembering to take the plastic container out first… ;-)
Very true Celia.
Thanks Barbara!
What a great post. I’ve had some spectacular disasters too. I pretty much experimented on my roommates in college. The first time I made sausage… well there’s a reason for that saying!
Greg, surely that’s what college roommates are for? :)
All so true Celia. I completely agree with your words about sourdough making…the exact same process occurred in our house and now it is more like a habit. To copy Lizzy…practise truly does make perfect, or close to it. I bet Craig is always a welcome visitor with his pastry!
Jane, I’m glad you understand! And Craig is always welcome – he’s fabulous company!
I have some bread on my bird table which has been there for 2 years. I kid you not. It is so rock hard that no living creature seems to be able to eat it. I’ve now left it there as a kind of experiment! By baking regularly (I find joining the Fresh from the oven group every month gives me a focus) I’ve become much more confident and intuitive. There have been spectacular disasters and it’s a horrible feeling when expensive ingredients end up in the bin but the more you bake the more success you have. Really well expressed Celia….now to perfect the Cornish pasty!
Sally, I told Pete about your bread on the bird table and, forgive us, we had a really good laugh about it! I look forward to reading about your perfect Cornish pastry in the future! :)
Hi Celia, nice article here! Also I’m learning lots from your various posts on sourdough breads. I have a wee question. Do you still get nice big hole when you actually knead the dough over and over? I had finally got those pretty big holes in my bread from a no knead recipe and I wonder if I handled my dough too much in the past (out of perhaps a multitude of other reasons…, same high hydration dough though.) Thanks in advance if you can spare a moment to answer :)
I barely knead at all anymore! When I first started all those years ago, I used to knead a lot, but nowadays I probably only spend a minute or two on the dough over the course of its prove. Here’s an example of the type of loaves we now make:
https://figjamandlimecordial.com/2011/06/22/pane-de-casa-a-tutorial/
Thanks Celia, your recipe looks practically the same as the one I followed from Breadtopia and had good success with (except I made them into loaves and had a second rise before baking). I’ll try your ciabatta recipe soon. Years ago, the way I was taught making ciabatta involved two stages of mixing. Even though they always turned out nice, I thought they were fiddly and rarely made them. I only started trying to make holey breads recently, and found every time I use the 2 stage-mixing method, I never get very holey breads. I used to knead my dough extensively for the more “traditional” bread, and the crumb were always pretty fine – they were nice, just not holey. Did you find that to be the case when you use to knead your dough?
Maybe. :) But that was when I was just starting out at breadmaking, so maybe the tighter crumb was a result of either the recipe I was using, or lack of experience on my part? What I have found is that the higher the hydration of my dough, the more likely I am to achieve a holey crumb. Hope this helps! :)
C, This is the best post ever. I made pie crust for decades that was shoe leather. Now, not so bad. Bread, I can do… now.
When I was a kid I wanted to make candy and spent a couple years burning sugar and turning it into rocks. So I gave up. Just the thought of making fudge gives me the willies. But i will try again. Thanks for the words of advice.
Maz.
Maz, now there’s a challenge! We went through a fudge making phase once – took about a dozen attempts to get it right! :)
Here are the posts, in case it’s of interest (but please don’t read them if it’s going to give you the willies!):
https://figjamandlimecordial.com/2009/04/19/fudge/
https://figjamandlimecordial.com/2009/05/04/creamy-vanilla-fudge/
How true! Thanks for the reminder that we should be more tolerant of our failures and just learn from them instead of beating ourselves up.
Thanks Pat!
Well put! I wasn’t sure whether to document my failures but I decide to because a) I found them funny and b) I thought that they were necessary!
Lorraine, our stuff-ups really are quite funny sometimes, aren’t they! :)
So true – I know that I need to keep making bread to get to the automatic point – just not quite there yet!
We had acacia flower fritters on the weekend – delicious! I found a recipe from Jacques Pepin here. They were so sweet and fragrant and we drank with local cider.
http://markbittman.com/foraging-for-fritters
Sounds lovely, Anna! :)
A really terrific post Celia. “If at first you don’t succeed…try, try again.” I have had plenty of dishes that I wouldn’t make for friends until I get them just right. Cooking is all about feeling comfortable with food and learning from our mistakes.
Karen, thank you! There really is joy in the process of trying and messing up and trying again – once we stop beating ourselves up over the failures! And I have to say, the dishes I’m proudest of are the ones we’ve taken the longest to master!
fantastic post – I have learnt well from my mother who makes fantastic bread and sponge cakes and yet I know there was a time when she didn’t – but she had only learnt through perseverence – blogging is fantastic for some circumventing of the experience needed but not all – I have learnt a lot about bread baking since starting blogging because I had recorded my learnings (ie failures) but I want to get on board the sourdough train some day but just haven’t managed to find the time for it – this is a good reminder that I need to be patient!
Johanna, we’ve only just mastered pasta after years of trying and throwing our hands in the air. It’s incredibly to finally have a workable recipe! :)
such true words! And so well timed. I am developing a few recipes for a company and so far I have had two ‘disasters’. I use the word loosely as we are eating them, even if I would not share what they look like with anyone.
Tandy, I’m sure your final recipes will be fantastic – and really well tested, which is actually more than we can say about a lot of recipes published these days! :)
Hear, hear, Celia. Not being afraid to fail is the key, isn’t it. Much of life around us seems to be about instant gratification and cooking takes time, practice and love (for the cooking itself as well as for the people you are cooking for). Perhaps too we are influenced by the TV programmes that abound depicting great food as well as the judgement of it and the cooks.
Jan, that is so true, isn’t it? All the competitive tv shows have put lots of pressure on home cooks!
Oh yes!
:)
Excellent post. I’m constantly making mistakes (and blogging about them, because my blog is my record of what I’ve made and how I’m progressing, not a picture-perfect make-me-now blog…) and although it doesn’t always feel like I’m learning from them, perhaps I am. My bread making has certainly improved (on the whole!) over the past few years to a stage where I can produce something edible. The problem with stuff-ups is when they aren’t edible and you’ve wasted ingredients, time and money – that’s when it’s so frustrating.
I should follow your advice though, and be braver about trying new things and techniques. I’ve never made so many things (pastry, waffles, pancakes, choux and many more too numerous to list) because I’m afraid of falling flat on the first attempt. You always give food for thought!
Caroline, thank you – I have the advantage of lots of eaters and less discerning chickens and worms who will generally eat what the humans won’t. It’s harder when expensive ingredients can end up being thrown out. I find I generally work up to more extravagant dishes (it’s not often I try a dish with truffles), but so many of the things we baulk at (choux pastry is a good example) are cheap to experiment with in ingredient terms. They’re really only expensive in time! :)
I think your bread is looking amazing these days! :)
Yes, I think it’s time that’s my problem at the moment rather than ingredients! Thank you for your compliment on my bread – it means a lot coming from you – I always admire your bread making!
Splendid post, for a young person you sure have great insight and wisdom.
Norma, thank you – I’m in my late 40s now, so I don’t get called young very often anymore! :)
wonderful post Celia. I think I’ve only recently REALLY understood what it means to practise and rework those failures.
Brydie, I think it’s a lesson all we breadmakers finally learn! There are so many loaves along the way that don’t work, and then all of a sudden we can throw the dough together in our sleep! :)
What incredible insight, I need to print this out for my students!
Thanks Barbara, I’m glad you enjoyed it! :)
Such a good lesson to apply to every aspect of our lives – I still act like a bratty child when I fail in the kitchen though! Especially when the kids refuse to eat something I know is awful but have spent hours assembling! Totally envious of your sun area and cucumbers, very clever.