My woefully inexpert guess is that advanced cooking should be thought of as optimization in a space of high dimension, where gradient descent will often zig-zag, making simple experiments inefficient. Then apart from knowledge of many landmarks (which is covered by cooking books), high cooking skill would involve ability to reframe recipes to reduce dimensionality, and intuition about how to change a process to make it better or to vary it without making it worse, given fine details of a particular setup and available ingredients. This probably can’t be usefully written down at all, but does admit instruction about changes in specific cases.
My woefully inexpert guess is that advanced cooking should be thought of as optimization in a space of high dimension, where gradient descent will often zig-zag, making simple experiments inefficient. Then apart from knowledge of many landmarks (which is covered by cooking books), high cooking skill would involve ability to reframe recipes to reduce dimensionality, and intuition about how to change a process to make it better or to vary it without making it worse, given fine details of a particular setup and available ingredients. This probably can’t be usefully written down at all, but does admit instruction about changes in specific cases.
Reducing dimensionality is the most useful cooking advice I have received. I now use a four factor model: salt, sweet, spice (heat), sour.
Is it salty enough? If no, add salt, soy sauce, or fish sauce; or reduce.
Is it sweet enough? If no, add sugar, jagery, maple syrup or caramelized onions.
The essentialism is to assign characteristics to ingredients (e.g. Tomatoes are sour.)
I learned this model from some south Indians, this model may be common in that culture. I’m not sure.
How do you reduce saltiness?
“Reduce” probably means boil off some water to increase the salt concentration of what remains.
Yes, this is what I meant.
“Add a potato (and afterwards throw it away)” is an advice I’ve heard but didn’t test.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat looks related to this concept. But some of the elements are different.