When a masterchef cooks a master dish, does the passion got transfered to the food ? Or only the recipe rules the taste? Say 10 people that have similar cooking skill and cook the same dish following a recipe. Will the food taste differently? Yes, probably most agree with this. But how about the same person cook the same dish for 10 days in a row following the same recipe, provided the raw ingredient more less the same, will the taste of the dish varies according to the mood and passion of the chef ?
Cooking A Meal
I guess this is a question need to be answered by chefs and confirmed by his/her audience. But let us start with some interesting aspect.
Repeatability of A Dish
In my other world of engineering, there is a method call GR&R (Gauge Repeatability and Reproducibility) to determine whether an instrument produce consistent result measuring the same item several times by several different people. Unfortunately, in tasting a meal, this become very complicated as different people will have different taste and subjective opinion when it comes to tasting a food.
There was a period when I quite periodically go to local restaurant and from time to time pretty much I order the same meal over and over again. And liking the dish very much, I cannot really spot obvious difference among those meals. But that’s more because human brain is doing its great in adjusting the expectation based on the experience or simply because I am not a trained food taster?
Or it could be, in a commercial food production as a restaurant, a repeatability of a dish will probably under strict control. The component that you read on a recipe “salt to taste” probably being specified to quite a detail. As different chefs on different shift and days should produce more less the same dish.
So, in gauging whether or not mood and passion of a chef a comercial environment probably not the best place.
The art of cooking?
Okay, now we have a chef friend cooks for a family gathering. If that chef just gone trough a nasty divorce, will he/she cook differently compare to the situation when he just won $100,000 lottery?
Does it tastes sweeter when the chef is in love, or more spicy if he/she is angry ? Does a chef cook more consistently if the kind of dishes is his passion meaning he/she will cook more ‘careless’-ly if the dishes is not his/her forte ?
All these question will lead to bigger question: is cooking an art or just method/procedure?
If cooking is an art and the dishes is one of a kind, then this masterpiece dish probably is not really repeatable. But if cooking just like “printer” who can produce same item over and over again then it’s not really an art, isn’t it ? Or is the art is the recipe itself, not the execution?
So there you are… What do you think? Voice your thinking on the comment section below !
Nov 2009
