The Beauty of Making Mistakes
”Learn how to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun”-Julia Child
The fact is, we all make mistakes. What sets you apart from others though, is what happens after. Do you take ownership of those mistakes and learn from them? I’ve made countless mistakes in (and let’s face it, out of) the kitchen. I’ve misjudged quantities, overcooked things, broken sauces from trying to work too fast, broken platters while overestimating my strength, learned the hard way that ginger has an enzyme that will curdle milk, gone over budget, realized I should have gotten more sleep, and mixed up Spanish words. Frankly, I should have known better a hundred times. I try, however, to never make the same mistake twice.
Now that I teach young cooks it’s fun to see the little blunders that the students make turn into small moments of insight, each one an opportunity to get better.
Mistakes are a vital part of cooking and life in the kitchen. If you ask any chef about it you’ll get stories. So we did just that. We asked a few notable chefs about mistakes in the kitchen. None could name just one.
Anthony Strong, Chef/Owner at Praire started cooking at 16 years old and told us that on his very first day in the kitchen, after the chef told him to boil eggs for the egg salad, he “cracked 5 flats of eggs and put the pot on the stove, brought them up to a “boil” and proudly walked the pot over to show the chef.” Thankfully, he’s able to laugh about it now and we can assure you he’s never done that again.
Lincoln Carson, Chef at Bon Temps, learned that smelling the plastic food storage containers to make sure they don’t stink like garlic before using them is a smart idea. Ever had pastry dough taste like garlic? Lincoln only did once, that’s for sure.
Daniel Patterson, chef/owner at Coi gave us an anecdote about cooking in Australia when one of his younger cooks burned the crab oil they needed in less than an hour. “…So I improvised. I added the innards as well as shells, which added a lot of moisture and interrupted the browning. Not exactly what I wanted. So I followed the sauce as it developed. It was too gamy and intense at first, so I added more oil and vegetable aromatics. There was a pork stock scented with fish sauce and soy simmering, so I added some of that- fat flavors liquid, so why not the inverse? In the end it was pretty wonderful, something I hadn’t really done before in quite that way, and it came out of a mistake. Mistakes and the necessity to fix them are opportunities to learn something new. What I did was based on thousands of similar processes that had worked and not worked, so there were many things I didn’t try to do because I’d already tried them and they didn’t work. It’s like running thousands of science experiments to develop some rules around how things interact with other things under certain conditions.”
That’s really the beauty of it. Mistakes not only teach you valuable lessons, they can open the door to new discoveries.
Mistakes keep you humble, and they make you better. You learn about that weird enzyme, you fix the sauce that broke, you don’t put vanilla ice cream base into a container that smells like onions, you just know a little more.
If you’re paying attention, you can apply that new knowledge to other things, and let it ripple out, farther and farther. On occasion, the mistake that seemed like a tragedy will create a flash of insight and creativity — and that can be simply magic.
— Chef Kirsten Goldberg
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