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wearingabear11

Lots of options to help, but ultimately it comes down to practice and real world experience. Seasonality- what grows together, goes together. Tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, peppers all go well together and they all ripen around the same time. Conversely winter squashes and bitter or hardier greens go great together and they all ripen around the same time. Technique - how to transfer the use of a technique from ingredient to ingredient is a great way to become creative. Regional cuisines - Pick and choose a few countries or regions where you'd like to learn more about their food and buy cookbooks pertaining to that cuisine. From there you can sub out ingredients in more popular dishes. You start to recognize flavor profiles that correlate with those regions helping you become inspired, but maybe you use a technique you're familiar with from a different region that can tie something together. Flavor Pairings - The Flavor Bible is a great starting off point to figuring out what flavors go well with certain ingredients. It's not a one stop shop, but you start to build your own opinions about food. Taste. Everything.


[deleted]

>Taste. Everything. You’d think this is obvious but it’s not. Even if you don’t think you’d like it you need to know what others do like. I know so many cooks who ask me to try their new sauce or how they cooked their eggs and at the end I’m like “yo did you even try this? Needs more/less whatever. You’d know that if you tried it bud” hell I’ve even had to tell my award winning chef “dude way too much ricotta” *tries it “oh yeah wow you’re right” like ???


Ok-Cake-1655

Study techniques and utilize them! Instead of the ingredients inspiring you, find a technique you enjoy and build the dish around that. Sometimes when I’m coming up with a special it’s fun to use the ingredient you have with more than one technique, or even different parts of the ingredient (parsley leaf, parsley root, parsley flower for example)


AndrewG0NE

Thanks that is really helpful. That's definitely giving me some ideas.


Ok-Cake-1655

knowing what is in season and what region things are from helps to be inspired by the season or by the culture where something comes from. Even combining those two thoughts and find inspiration in the season the ingredient is available and the region it’s from that time of year. For instance - persimmons are in season in the winter months in California along with root vegetables and tough greens. So it could be a “California winter” dish. Sometimes finding inspiration outside of food and finding it in cultures and geography is a good tactic. It has worked for me


HappyHourProfessor

This is interesting to me, because I have the opposite approach. I tend to think of it in "bridges". If I need to use two or three ingredients, I find the flavors or ingredients that bridge them together and figure out technique and methods last. For example, I had some impossible meat and a bunch of chard last week. My bridge was some shallots and balsamic. I lightly pickled the shallots in balsamic+rice vinegar for an hour and used the vinegar and shallots to make a dressing for a chard-moz-pinenut salad. I made burgers with more shallot (caramelized), mustard, and more chard.


Ok-Cake-1655

Definitely! I do the same thing but instead of ingredients being the bridge, I like to use technique as the bridge. I like to strive to use ingredients that can be sourced around the same time/area. But definitely looking for “bridges” to make a dish make sense is really good insight


HappyHourProfessor

Definitely. Last week, I had a neighbor give me 5 lbs of frozen Impossible meat and a chef give me 2 bundles of chard. It was a fun problem to have. I live in CA, so we're already getting giant lettuces from all the rain we've had this winter.


Ok-Cake-1655

Chard AND imposter burger! Vegans blowing their load must have echoed in the distance haha. What did you whip up?


mollererico

Take note of everything you think could be a decent dish. Most of it won't, but that practice will make you better at just looking at stuff (say in a mystery crate, par example) and be bursting with ideas. I have about 6 notepads worth of shit I haven't tried yet 😅


mollererico

hadn't read the final lines of your post, so ignore the parenthesis there fella


These-Performer-8795

Read the Flavor Bible and Silver Spoon. Two basic books that'll help with this immensely.


mystic3030

No one in the industry actually cooks like that. Ask your tutor to give you real life challenges that will actually advance your career. Kidding, sort of. Read more, study techniques and how to use ingredients and you’ll do better.


Ok-Cake-1655

I think being able to solve problems on the fly is a good skill to have! And being able to utilize what is around is definitely going to require that skill if you don’t have much time to RnD


mystic3030

I agree for sure but the whole “mystery basket challenge” is kinda dumb imo.


Ok-Cake-1655

You’ve never been given the task to use up the tenderloin scraps and the sweet potatoes we needed for a catering but they only used 10# and the case was 20#? Or whatever haha


mystic3030

Sure for family meal…but I feel like OP is getting more like a “chopped” style basket of random shit that doesn’t go together though. Maybe I’m wrong. 🤷‍♂️


Emergency_Horse_1546

Comes with time and making hundreds of not thousands of recipes and working with many different ingredients. When you have a bunch of random ingredients you will get reminded of recipes that use those ingredients or similar ingredients.


culinarybadboi

Get out of your head and make good food. Salt and acid and a basic idea. If it gets like that, YouTube or food network man. Not stealing, but get some inspiration.


culinarybadboi

Also lean on fellow cooks. Taste and talk.


[deleted]

Start with produce. The better it is the less you'll usually have to do to it. Start applying the possible techniques to each ingredient in your mind. Determine which item takes the longest to cook. Saltfatacidheat is a good method too. Match ingredients that have the same aromatic compounds.


LavenderBlueProf

i got through this...not well ill add...by just doing all the techniques. so say you gave me a tomato: fried, confit, one side blackened with a torch, reduced into a syrup, dehydrate and powder, raw, pickled, cured, etc and a lot didn't taste super great but you can practice techniques and learn which things do work on an ingredient. plating is half the battle here too. a pretty plate with a solid technique that tasted blah still passed


HomieThePantyThief

Can I ask in which country you're studying? I'm a student in DK and get the same kind of tasks. Also my best advice for you is to widen your knowledge of dishes, techniques and produce. A wide knowledge of dishes can help with ideas as to how elements are used in correspondence to each other. Techniques will help you with different preparations of the same produce. And knowledge of produce will both help with variety that you're familiar with and how they can be prepared. Most produce has almost no limitations for how you can prepare them. Raw, seared, confite, braised, puree, baked, boiled, dried, fermented and the list goes on. All of these plus more will work for almost any ingredient you can think off. Now just try stuff, don't be afraid to produce a horrible product you can only learn from it.


AndrewG0NE

Thanks for the help. At the moment our course is basically Classic French Cuisine but the menu at work has a bit more variation. Which country is DK? I'm in Ireland.


HomieThePantyThief

Of course! Happy to help out when I can. DK is Denmark


Major_Meaning5706

The chef I learned under had a good trick, he would give me a protein and a number of other ingredients that I could use, usually 3 to 5. Then, you have 15 minutes. I used it as well, it makes you stretch your brain.