Recipes - Simple Recipes

Simple Recipes

What Is A Simple Recipe

Most define a simple recipe as a recipe with at least two, but not more than four, flavor concentrates in it. Their appeal includes not only just being quicker and easier to make but also often having superior flavor. Just because a recipe looks simple, doesn't mean it tastes simple, sometimes it can be far from that. Heres two Examples

Three ingredients each and both loaded with complexity. One thing about simple recipes is that they're trustworthy, in a sense. When it comes to trying others' recipes, you can see a 10-ingredient recipe and it looks good on paper, but often tastes kind of muddy. If you see a three-ingredient recipe and you know you like two of the concentrates, you can usually trust that that third ingredient you've never tried before doesn't ruin it, unless it just sounds absolutely terrible to you.

Another thing about these simpler recipes is that they can be incredible without as much revising. If you've used your knowledge of flavors that you gained from mixing lots of different things, mixing other peoples' recipes, and most importantly sampling your flavors by themselves to find a great pairing or ménage à trois, or you've sold your soul for one, it's not that difficult to re-balance the mix with a little %s adjustment. When you taste a simple recipe and it isn't quite right, it's not hard to figure out what's off and how to fix it. If you've thrown in 10 different things and it ain't right, figuring out how to fix the problem can be too daunting and time-consuming to the point it's just no fun anymore.

Developing A Simple Recipe

When it comes to developing them, find the best flavors that work together and balance them well. Do that, and often layering similar flavors becomes not only unnecessary but frequently detrimental. You notice how Rick usually ends those wonderfully detailed and fun-to-read flavor notes with suggestions for use? Most of those are clearly very well-educated guesses, but they're still just guesses. If you want to make great simple recipes, take it a step further. When you test your flavors, think about flavors you've tried in the past, and make your own suggestions. Then try your guesses and see how they work. Many won't. But the more you practice making pairings and simple mixes out of flavors you've just tested at various concentrations to get a feel for how they work at different levels, the more often they'll hit instead of missing. Flavors can shine tremendously in simple recipes, and you can find that they work amazingly well when working with 2 or 3 other concentrates vs a dozen.

Another way to make simple recipes is to consolidate ingredients. If you find yourself over-complicating your recipe in ways that aren't really making much improvement in it, take a big step back and look at it again, with an eye toward using fewer ingredients. Find one perfect concentrate to do what you're trying to get two or three imperfect flavors to do and just let it do that. Try different %s to do that. You can try consolidating others' recipes. You see something interesting to you in what looks like an overly complicated recipe, think about how you might be able to keep the part that interests you but use one or two flavors to do the work of several.

Simple Recipe Examples

1-2-3 Recipes

1-2-3 Recipes have become a fairly popular method of creating simple recipes. Not only is at a challenging way of making a recipe, but it can produce wonderful recipes that are simple and straight to the point. Think of it as flavor notes in a recipe form. Heres some popular examples of 1-2-3 Recipes

Simple Recipe Threads

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