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I learned how not to follow a recipe at my very first real job in a New York City restaurant. Just out of college and yet to enter culinary school, I had no experience, but how hard could it be? I’d be making salads.
Not just any salads, however. Caesar salad was the restaurant’s signature dish, and the homemade dressing was the most important part. The cook who demonstrated the recipe to me made it look so easy, but just to be sure, I meticulously wrote down all the steps anyway.
“First,” he said, “coddle the eggs by cooking them for three minutes in boiling water.”
Easy enough, I thought, as I watched him peel and separate the coddled eggs, discarding the cooked white and plopping the still-runny yolks into a mixing bowl.
“Next, add fresh lemon juice, minced anchovies, Worcestershire, grated Parmesan, a bit of garlic and Dijon mustard. Mix it up with a whisk, then add some olive oil.”
Before my eyes the mixture magically transformed from sloppy, eggy goo to smooth, white, creamy dressing, with nothing more, it seemed, than a simple turn of the whisk.
Piece of cake, I thought. Just dump everything into a bowl and whisk away. It’s just a Caesar salad, after all.
The following day it was my turn. I pulled out my notes and got started, coddling the eggs for three minutes exactly. When I cracked them open, they looked just as they had the day before.
I plopped the warm yolks into a bowl and added the lemon juice, anchovies, Worcestershire, Parmesan, garlic and mustard. A nonevent so far! Next came the oil, which I added slowly, in a thin stream, just like he had shown me. Soon the dressing began to thicken. Whisk, whisk, whisk. Other than my arm getting tired, this was no big deal.
But then something strange happened. My beautiful dressing suddenly turned from white and creamy to gloppy and oily. I tried harder. Whisk, whisk, whisk. Nothing. WHISK, WHISK, WHISK! Still a curdled mess.
In desperation, I grabbed a blender and dumped everything in. The blender whirred to attention, but my salad dressing did not. It was sad and broken, just like my ego.
Observing my struggle, another of the restaurant’s cooks approached my station. It took him just seconds to know exactly what had happened. Turns out that making a salad dressing is anything but simple. I had failed to execute an essential cooking technique: creating an emulsion, the basis of all vinaigrettes, mayonnaises and hollandaise and other sauces. For Caesar salad dressing, he told me, the egg yolk acts as an emulsifier, helping to hold everything in place, but “you added too much oil and it broke. It became oversaturated and couldn’t hold together anymore. Once that happens, there’s nothing to do but start over.”
“But I followed the recipe exactly!” I protested.
“Every time you make this,” he said, pointing out another maxim of cooking, “it will be a little bit different. It depends on the freshness of the eggs, the temperature in the kitchen. Sometimes you’ll use all the oil and sometimes not. Rely less on what’s written and more on what you see. When it looks good and tastes good, you’re done.”
I tossed the entire thing in the trash—along with the recipe—and started over. This time I trusted my instincts, and the dressing came out perfectly. Besides mastering Caesar salad dressing, I’d also learned the most valuable lesson of my career: Even if a recipe says that the rice has five minutes to go or that the cake should be done by now, if it doesn’t seem right or look right, then it’s not right. Cooking is a process and a skill, but most of all it’s a feeling.
Get the recipe for Caesar Salad
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