In the early pandemic, I decided to pick up the hobby of reading cookbooks. Fortunately, I had already gone through the phase of baking bread a couple of years earlier, so all of that was out of my system.
I was pretty obsessed back then, to the point where the sourdough starter reminded me of an electronic Tamagotchi. It was this strange little digital pet that you had to feed by pressing buttons every day, otherwise it would get upset. If you’re younger and don’t know what that is, it’s worth looking up online to have a laugh.
When you make bread, you have two options: you can use instant yeast in a package, or this living and breathing starter. You feed the starter a mixture of flour and water every day—or at least a couple of times a day—to keep it alive. One time when I took a trip to Washington DC, TSA took a look at the starter, and I was immediately flagged for secondary screening. Fortunately, it was an older lady who understood and let it go. It technically was less than 3 ounces, just saying.
Reading cookbooks is quite different from browsing recipes online. Because they aren’t easily searchable, you often find deeper insights in niche books focused on a specific cuisine. We’re all familiar with Chinese food, but reading about something like Shanghainese cuisine highlights how diverse the food world is. What can seem monotone at first reveals a much richer tapestry when you look more closely.
To keep track of my cooking experiments, I started my own personal wiki. My process would be:
1. Find the recipe I want to cook
2. Write it down on the personal wiki with ingredients, steps, and history
3. Take a couple photos
4. Upload the photos to the wiki recipe
This process is no different than the spiral bound journals of recipes our parents used to have, but one key aspect that I have found to be a game changer, is documenting the history of cooking the recipe (or for my techie peeps out there, keeping track of the diffs).
There is something to be said about iterating through a recipe and seeing how small tweaks make a difference here and there.
How do you improve a recipe? One way is by trial and error. But the easier shortcut way is to ask someone more experienced what their recipe is.
In Vancouver, one of our favorite Peruvian restaurants is a place called Silvestres. There is this one dish, pescado sudado, which is a stew of tomatoes, ají amarillo, and fish. Usually in North America, when you ask a restaurant for their recipe, you get a hard no, and you might try to reverse engineer it by looking at the ingredient list. However there was one exception where I asked how they made a sauce at a restaurant, and they e-mailed me a powerpoint on how to make it.
We were recently in Costa Rica, and after many days of eating the local cuisine, we were craving something Asian. In La Fortuna, we found a Peruvian restaurant that served pescado sudado. The dish was quite good, with a tomato sauce, chunks of fish, and some fried strips of cassava on top.
I had previously messaged them on WhatsApp to confirm their opening times, and I decided to ask how they cooked their recipe. I was shocked when the lady gave me her recipe and let me ask questions to clarify some of the steps.
You know when you ask a good cook for a recipe, they give you some instructions. But when you delve deeper, you realize they usually leave out important details—not out of intent, but because they’ve done it so many times that it’s second nature to them.
I have spent a lot of time looking up recipes for pescado sudado on the internet. I found some on YouTube and Facebook, but unfortunately there aren’t many Peruvian homestyle cookbooks out there, so I didn’t have a good baseline for reference.
The recipe I found online, at a high level, was: sauté onions and garlic, add blitzed tomatoes, then add ají amarillo (yellow pepper). It is very difficult to source ají amarillo in North America, so the next best thing is to use it from a jar.
However, every time I cooked the dish, it was too spicy and the balance was off. When asking the Costa Rican chef for her recipe, she mentioned slicing the tomatoes into rounds, and when using yellow peppers, to deseed them (she didn’t tell me about deseeding the first time). The odd thing about chili peppers is that there is a difference between heat and spice. Spiciness, to me, refers to chilis with that intense kick—the kind you get when you ask for Thai food “spicy.” Heat is what remains when you devein a chili and remove the seeds. You get the flavor and back heat without it being overwhelmingly spicy.
I had a couple flaws in my recipe:
1. I blitzed the tomatoes instead of sliced them into rounds. That small change dramatically changed the texture of the dish making it more velvety.
2. I had been using jarred ají Amarillo sauce which already had the seeds ground into it. So no matter what, the dish would always be too spicy.
#1 was easy to fix, and for #2, what I did instead is use Mexican guajillo and Pasilla Oaxaca chilis to get the heat.
Looking at the history I was a little shocked that the first time I cooked the dish was November 26, 2020, and only now 6 years later do I feel this recipe has passed the taste test.
Good recipes aren’t just a list of ingredients, steps, and instructions. At its core is the wisdom of the creator who iterated through the recipe many times to get it just right.
RECIPE
Ingredients
- 350 grams of fish (rockfish or ling cod, doesn’t matter any fish)
- half a sliced onion
- 1 large garlic sliced
- Sliced ginger
- 1/4 yellow bell pepper
- segment of guajillo, pasilla oaxaca, tiny peruvian spice
- 1/2 cup chicken stock
SIDE
- 60 grams quinoa per person (120g total) pot in pot steamed
Directions
CHILI PREP
- Soak de seeded chilis in boiling water
- Blitz with water
FISH
- Cut fish into cubes
- Marinate with a little salt
SAUCE
- Add lemon as needed
- Stir fry onion, garlic, ginger, and bell pepper for a couple minutes, add salt
- Remove, then add tomatoes, let it sautee for a couple minutes until the thick sauce comes out
- Add chili mixture
- Add salt and sugar to balance
- Add fish
- Put on low heat