One of the ingredients I've been experimenting with
Testing recipes for my new cookbook is a lot harder than it sounds. I have ingredient attention deficit disorder. When I pick up an ingredient, I want to try it in a brand new dish. If I’m satisfied by a great recipe, I want to move on to finding another as equally satisfying.
Luckily I have customers who beg for the same things again and again from my commercial kitchen, those foods that have attained the “wow factor,” so I have a really good repertoire. I’m using many of these in the cookbook, but I wanted to have some really new and fresh ideas included alongside the old stand-bys. That means testing the same recipe with the same or slightly altered ingredients, over and over and over.
Nicolas is really good at making things several times. As I write, he’s in the kitchen making his 4th (or is it his 5th?) Chocolate Honey Cake of the week. He loves altering ingredients by a smidgen to see how the original recipe is affected. The outcome is always perfection (if it’s not perfect, he’s not done testing it) and there’s usually some swooning involved for those he tries the finished product on.
Sometimes my tendency is to make up a recipe and say, “Good enough.” But fortunately, I have a stubborn streak in me that won’t let me stop testing, no matter how tedious, until I have a “WOW!” result. So if I go past my June 2010 deadline for the cookbook, please forgive me. I’m working on WOW as fast as I can.
Posted by: Cora 
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