One of the reasons a recipe can become tiresome to follow, you know - consulting the page 5 seconds after you just read the recipe for the 15th time, forgetting and going back again (is it just me?) - is, I believe, because we need to understand the bigger ‘why’ in order for our mind to successfully imprint the information.
Instead of learning the recipe, we want to follow one initially to look for patterns. In other words, learn from the recipe. Each step is a little push towards the desired outcome. The challenge is that the majority of food instructions don’t explain the why, they instruct you to just do it.
So, it’s up to us, the cook, to ask our own ‘why’, or consult someone with more knowledge. If we do this with most steps of the process, cooking eventually becomes second nature.
For example… Why is so much liquid added to the pot? Is it because the cooking time is longer and evaporation will make good work of most of it? Or, why do recipes often suggest that the protein meets room temperature before cooking? Seeking the culinary answer to the mechanics of cooking will in my mind rapidly improve cooking skills. So, I’ll endeavour to add these ‘whys’ in as much as possible when sharing food.
In the slap dash video above, Tom and I show you how we make baked kumara with green sauce. It’s simple, gloriously-stupidly so. But that’s what we need most of the time, right? Also, please excuse the police sirens in the background. I hope it’s not too distracting.
I bake kumara (sweet potato for my North American friends) whole at least once a week. It it’s a beautiful way to build a meal. It can be cooked ahead of time and doesn’t require anything other than a hot oven. We pair kumara with all manner of sides, proteins, sauces, seeds and nuts. It’s also a nourishing food to eat as we transition seasons. I’ve attempted to add ‘why’ answers to as many steps as possible in the video. Enjoy!
Need
2 orange/beauregard kumara (adjust depending on number of humans you are feeding, we allocate a half kumara per person usually), sea salt, baking paper, butter to finish. Key utensils: baking tray
For green sauce: 3 big handfuls of parsley, 2 big handfuls of coriander, 1 clove of garlic, 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, 2 tablespoons of sherry vinegar, juice of half a lemon plus zest of whole lemon, sea salt. Key utensils: microplane, mortar & pestle, chef knife
Do
Set oven to bake, 160 deg Celsius. Line baking tray with baking paper. Rinse kumara, pat dry then add to baking tray with a sprinkle of sea salt underneath. Bake kumara for 1-1 1/2 hours. The check for doneness is bubbly bits leaching out from underside of kumara.
While kumara bakes, make the green sauce. Full instructions in the video. We used a mortar and pestle, however a food processor also works, m&p is just Tom’s preferred method. Also, we forgot to add the garlic in the video! It was added later (one clove, microplane it in), however in an ideal world I would have added the garlic towards the start.
Share this post