My idea for starting The Geek Chef blog was to create a place to start collecting the nuts and bolts of cooking, the details, the minutia, and less of a concern about specific recipes.
There are hundreds of websites available to find recipes for anything you want to cook, and while the discussion and exchange of recipes is definitely welcome here, my particular interest as a cook is, how you can guarantee that every time you cook something, it’s delicious.
How do I make it delicious every time, I think that is a question most cooks must ask themselves? We may think that the answer is in a different recipe, a different selection of herbs or spices, or better quality ingredients. While these options will affect a different outcome, they don’t necessarily guarantee a better final dish.
The key lies in understanding what we are cooking, and how best to treat it. Experience will bring knowledge of how best to treat a particular item say, pot roast, or biscuits, or tripe, or what have you, but I’ve found that unless you are making a particular dish repeatedly and regularly it’s difficult to understand it. If we possess an underlying understanding of how things work, then we can translate it to a variety of different situations or ingredients.
That being said, I am not particularly interested in chemistry, but it does sometimes help explain what is going on when we are cooking, and what the optimal conditions are to get good results. For me, cooking is all about people, we cook to eat, we eat to live. I have seen that the discussion of food and cooking can become so intellectual that we lose touch with what we are discussing, but at the end of the day, you can’t eat your words, so I think we should try to keep it on the plate. ;)
Again, I hope The Geek Chef will be a place to discuss the details of cooking, the theory and practice, ingredients, techniques and tools, but also, experiences, questions and answers, interviews and articles.
Just as an aside… I am not a writer, or a blogger, I am a cook. So please be patient with me while I figure out how this all works. If you any questions or suggestions, or anything that doesn’t quite fit into the format here, email me and we’ll figure it out.
The Geek Chef
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