Recipe Anarchist — Pasta Madre Paradigm

I am a recipe anarchist. I can’t help myself from changing at least a little something.

I wasn’t so rebellious at the beginning. When I was ten, I was already used to preparing my lunch. Usually, it meant I had to cook the pasta, reheat the sauce somebody made for me, and assemble. That was easy. I started seriously experimenting with new recipes I had never made before, only after I had moved to university and had to provide food on my own. Back then, every time I tried something new I was pretty scared of leaving the path of the sacred recipe. I used to be loyal to the recipe and stuck to it blindly.

I remember the first time I prepared a ciambellone (a simple cake, usually made for breakfast) based on a recipe I got from my roommate during my first year of college. Making a cake was something scary, because it involved an expertise I didn’t have. I followed it passage by passage, weighing exactly all of the ingredients and taking in all of the suggestions she gave me: first mix the eggs well with the sugar, incorporate the flour little by little, and make sure you see the bubbles when you add the baking powder. The cake turned out really good and fluffy.

That year I started to test my cooking skills, and instead of a typical Italian nonna imparting her wisdom to me or my mother (who always hated cooking), middle aged women from all over Italy taught me how to cook through an online cooking forum I joined. One day, it was a gloomy winter evening, cold and humid, I was freezing at my desk, staring at my computer, when I found a pizza recipe on the forum. I decided to try it. It was my first time making pizza, and even though I followed the recipe, it was a nightmare.

Kneading the dough was not a big deal. The real problem in this story was letting the dough rise. According to the recipe, the dough should at least double in size, and this was related to a time indication of two hours. I was so naif to expect my dough to rise exactly in two hours. I would have even been content with maybe two and a half hours. After almost three hours, I asked, “Why is my dough not growing? How will I understand when it is ready?”

As I mentioned, that day was winter, cold and humid, and not a good day to give pizza making my first try. I remember going back and forth from the forum thread to my dough sitting near the heater, well covered under a towel, trying to ask questions on the status of my pizza on the forum in real time. But I was without help and couldn’t understand what I should expect from my dough. Of course, my pizza ended up being under-proofed, heavy, and thick.

That night I learned two things. First that if I wanted to do pizza I had to start well in advance to give it the time to rise. Second, I learned that recipes can’t teach you what experience does.

Few years after the heavy-pizza incident, I started getting more rebellious against recipes thanks to an empty fridge and the lack of measurement tools. I was still a student, I had moved to another town, and my apartment did not have a scale. Sans scale, I tried out all of the alternative ways of measuring possible. I measured how much flour could fit in a glass, or how much oil in a spoon. Furthermore, being a student, I often lacked the staples of home-baking. Sometimes I didn’t have enough eggs, I never had butter, and I often ran out of yogurt. Not surprisingly, my level of experimentation was intense at that time. If I found a recipe that I liked, I was guided by my past experiences that I had gained from stringently following recipes and tried to substitute ingredients. I judged the texture of a cake mixture by comparing it to my memories, pondering if it was smooth enough, too liquid, or too dense. I tried to figure if it could work and (of course) it didn’t many times. But I learned a lot from my mistakes, and I learned also how to understand when the pizza dough is well proofed.

Nowadays I’m not afraid of substituting ingredients when I find a recipe I like. I may not have all of the things listed, or maybe there is an ingredient I want to avoid, so I adjust accordingly. I have to admit that I can’t help modifying at least a little something. I love recipes, and I always search for them. Unlike before, though, I use them more as inspirational ideas, as a starting point for my creativity when I want to turn the few vegetables left in the fridge in a tasty soup or mix them successfully into polpette -- and I can tell you from experience that not everything mixed together makes good polpette...