On Experimentation and Failure

“It doesn’t always work.”

That’s my philosophy for great home cooking. “It doesn’t always work”.

On shows like “MasterChef”, or “TopChef”, or “Next Iron Chef” or…all of those great competition cooking shows to which I’m addicted, there’s no room for dishes that don’t work. You screw up, you pack your knives, remove your chef’s coat, or leave the stadium – and go home.  Thankfully, at HOME, there are no judgmental super-star celebrity chefs waiting to eviscerate your dish (before they tell how much they appreciate your talent, dedication and passion) and send you packing.

At home, we get to screw up – a lot.  Even with good technique and an understanding of flavor profiles, it’s pretty easy to produce a culinary disaster.  Great cooking is an iffy business.  But by going down in flames (hopefully not literally, though there were a couple of times a decade or so ago where I was minus more than a few eyelashes and had no hair left on my hands) we learn things!

Case in point: recently, I was working on my ravioli technique.  Having gotten comfortable with homemade pasta dough (it’s really easy), I’ve been trying to develop some good fillings.  So, I made a filling from roasted cauliflower (by itself, incredibly delicious) and pine nut puree, with a blue cheese cream sauce and grated gingered beet topping.

Not a great combo.  The gingered beets and the cauliflower worked well together, but the pine nuts overwhelmed the delicate flavor of the pine nuts, and the blue cheese was the wrong flavor choice.  The sauce itself was also too thick, and ruined the texture of the ravioli. Out of 10, I give the dish a 4.

However, I learned a lot. First, while blue cheese and cauliflower may pare well traditionally, that is not necessarily the case when savory is emphasized.  Second, saucing of ravioli can be a BITCH!  Third, I should pay attention to what I already know, and not serve a sauce that isn’t complementary in color to the dish being sauced.

If I were to try this dish again, I would remove the pine nuts from the stuffing, make the sauce by pureeing the gingered beets, and leave the cauliflower puree inside the ravioli to shine on its own.  The pine nuts would be lightly sprinkled on top of the dish.

Failure – it’s what leads to better things.