How To Make Any Recipe Your Own

You just searched online for a recipe.

Okay, let’s keep it real. I just searched for a recipe online.

A recipe for apple crumble.

And I got 48 million hits.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

How on earth could there be that many recipes out there?!

Of course I’m not even going to get to page 2 of those search results.

Apple crumble is pretty simple.

And my search for a recipe was just to see if there were any comments about which spice to add.

Cinnamon or mixed spice?

I went with cinnamon, if you were wondering.

When you have a more involved recipe, here’s how to make it much easier to find the right one and make it your own.

Do Some Research

Look through your cookbooks and online.

Sometimes you’ve got a great recipe right there on your kitchen shelf.

If it reads like something you could follow and the photo looks good. Go with it.

However, when one single recipe doesn’t meet what you’re looking for.

Read through a few recipes, and limit yourself to just 3.

That’s 3 recipes that you like the sound of.

You may have to read 4 or 5 recipes to find 3 that resonate with you.

Then take the best bits of those 3 recipes and build your own recipe.

Combine Ingredients

The second step that will save your sanity, is combining ingredients.

Basically that means, drop similar ingredients.

Does the recipe call for onions and garlic?

Drop one of them.

For my cooking, chopped onions feature a lot, so I’d drop the garlic.

You could choose to drop the ingredient you don’t have on hand.

A recipe calls for parsley and coriander? Choose one.

Both are herbs, both will give a herby flavour.

What we’re doing here is making life easy and making the recipe your own.

You don’t need to ever follow any recipe to a tee.

Once you’ve racked up hundreds of cooking hours, you’ll totally see this for yourself.

A recipe is a guide.

Never see it as a rigid process that must be followed to the letter.

That’s what baking is about, but that’s a post for another day.

Write it Down

The final step in making sense of any recipe, is to write it out.

This step familiarises you with the recipe before you get cooking.

You’ll have a clear idea of the ingredients, what you need to buy.

Whether you need to pre-heat the oven…, what kitchen utensils you’ll need ...

It’s a bit like having a trial run of the recipe without actually doing any cooking.

That way, when the recipe author says add this or put in to your oven at x degrees. You won’t be caught out.

You might think, oh I can just read the recipe.

You could. But you’ll probably miss something.

Something about writing it out makes you do a mental walkthrough of the recipe.

These steps have been a huge help to me, and make it much easier for me to try new recipes. Both for meals and for baking.

By the way, I hit the jackpot with the apple crumble recipe, how could I go wrong with a recipe billed as the easiest apple crumble recipe?

I have a growing bank of recipes jotted down on the Blank Recipe Template available in the Free Planner Printable Library. You can use them too, to build your bank of recipes. Bon appetit.