Follow the Recipe

by Mark R. Vogel

Recipes. What would we do without them? Can you even imagine a cookbook without recipes? For most people, recipes are indispensable for preparing many dishes, especially unfamiliar ones.

Yet culinary professionals will tell you that chefs never use recipes. Even the home cook, when preparing tried and true dishes will not use a recipe. Or do they? Truth is, everyone uses a recipe. It's just not always written down.

There are three components to a recipe. The first is the list of ingredients. The second is the amount of the ingredients. And the third is the preparation instructions.

Be it a professional cook, or grandma making her traditional meatloaf for the 200th time, he or she has at least two thirds of the recipe components memorized, namely, the ingredients and preparation instructions.

The only factor that may vary is the amount of the ingredients. Many cooks will "eyeball" the amounts in combination with tasting to determine whether to add more salt, sugar, herbs, etc. (The exception is pastry and baking where more chemistry is involved and amounts must be more precise).

One day at a four star French restaurant where I once worked, I was awarded the dubious honor of making family meal. This is the meal that is prepared for the entire staff at the beginning or end of the shift.

I was told "use the pork shoulder in the meat walk-in", (restaurant lingo for a large refrigerator you can literally walk into). That was the extent of my instructions. On, first thing I needed to know is what to do with pork shoulder.

Shoulder meat from any animal is tough with significant connective tissue. That means it needs a wet cooking method. Braising is the obvious answer.

So then I pull up my osso buco (braised veal shanks) recipe in my head and just substitute pork shoulder. I know I need oil, vegetables, stock, wine, tomato paste and herbs. So I grabbed some carrots, celery and onion, (otherwise known as mirepoix), garlic, thyme, rosemary and parsley.

I trimmed the excess fat from the meat, cut it into large chunks, seasoned them with salt and pepper, and seared them in a large pot in canola oil. Then I sautéed the mirepoix, followed by tomato paste and garlic.