I don't know about you all but I never follow recipes to the letter because I love the possibility of happy discoveries, not to mention that I'm never good with following directions anyway. I use recipes more as "guidelines." I like to figure things out on my own which is another reason why I almost never read instruction manuals for electronics or gadgetry.
And 98% of the time, the creation I come up with is really delicious or if it initial doesn't come out the way I like, I can figure out some remedy to fix the dish so that it eventually comes out tasty. It just might end up being a Fraken-dish but if it tastes good and looks good, who cares, no? Okay, unless perhaps you're on Top Chef or Hell's Kitchen but in the real world, it is okay in my book.
Is it you or the recipe?
Now the 2% of the time when I go by a recipe and it turns out to be an utter disaster, I start to wonder if something is wrong or missing in the recipe. I know this makes me sound like I'm some egomaniac who just can't accept that perhaps the problem is moi and my technique, but there is a difference between being a tad off but close, and completely missing the mark.
For example, today I had planned on posting this delicious recipe for Mandarin Orange Cheese Sandesh which you see in the beautiful picture above. The ingredients are simple: low-fat cottage cheese, organic sugar, and mandarin oranges. You mix the sugar and cottage cheese together and then simmer in a saucepan on low for 5 minutes, mash some of the mandarins to stir in with the cheese, and put the other slices on top, and chill for 30 minutes. Simple, and not much room for error, or so I thought. Now, I tried this recipe nearly three times, and each time I didn't even come close to getting that cake-like appearance you see in the picture. I got a dish of soupy cheese, see in this picture. Not even close, and kinda yucky looking.
Last time, I even followed the recipe to the letter, and still what I got was orange, cottage cheese soup with icky looking curd that looked nothing like the picture in the cookbook. For chilling, I even experimented and put the dish in the freezer for 2 hours and what I got was an orange, cottage cheese icy and as creative as that sounds, it's just not appetizing. What is the problem? I racked my brain.
Cultural translation of food names
So, then I go to the Internet, and the traditional Indian way of making this dish calls for Paneer cheese which in America is referred to as "cottage cheese" but the two may be similar in taste but they are very different in consistency and that is where the problem was and why I got soup versus cubes. I went to the grocery store and picked up regular old cottage cheese made by Clover.
Paneer is thicker in consistency, has no liquid like US cottage cheese, and almost looks like silky tofu. FXCuisine has a homemade paneer recipe with some beautiful pictures of the cheese, and at the end you can see that it is thick and you can make it cube like so you can make the Mandarin Orange Cheese Sandesh look like the picture in my cookbook.
So, in this case, the error in the cookbook recipe was cultural assumption that the reader would understand that "cottage cheese" meant paneer cheese and not "American store bought regular cottage cheese." Now, is there a way to make this dish using the regular US cottage cheese, perhaps, but I'm not in the mood today to buy a 4th tub of cottage cheese to find out. I did see a version that used dry Jell-O but I'd rather stick to all natural ingredients.
Have you ever experienced recipe confusion like this?
