Mastering the Restaurant Dish

There are many badges of honor amongst home cooks. There’s the “cooking for screaming kids” badge, the “won over the mother-in-law” badge, and the “Thanksgiving dinner without losing sanity” badge. That’s a tough one.
However, one badge stands above as the finest achievement a home cook can earn: the “mastered a dish you had in a restaurant” badge…

We have met some of the most wonderful people during Foodies’ Night In (#fni) and have had the good fortune to become fast friends with food-adoring people all over the world. Let us introduce you to one of them: always present with a helpful tip, comment, recipe or question, meet Guest Blogger Chris Perrin. Now here’s a man who takes his food seriously. See it for yourself in his own blog, entitled BlogWellDone.com. Whether he’s writing with a style that’s more “tongue in cheek” (as seen below) or about the best tongue dish, the man certainly takes a stand.

Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

However, one badge stands above as the finest achievement a home cook can earn: the “mastered a dish you had in a restaurant” badge. There is nothing more satisfying than cooking a meal made by a professional chef (with her fancy kitchen, fancy assistants and fancy dishwashers) and knowing that you nailed it.
Why go to the effort you ask? Well, if the badge (and shock and awe from friend and foe alike) isn’t enough, cooking professional dishes at home is an economical and healthier way to eat good food at home.

Sound good?

Good! Here are five steps for mastering the art of copying restaurant dishes.

The Restaurant Recipe

Just Ask Okay, it’s kind of cheating to ask what’s in a dish, but the quickest way to copy it is by asking what’s in it. It doesn’t always work. Some chefs (and servers) love their secrets, but some will be more than happy to share and when they do, you’ve won the battle.
Just Sample If the restaurant won’t give you the answer, you’re going to have to divine the ingredients yourself. Does this require a Top Chef-like palate? Heck no, all you need to do is eat.Unless you know the dish, the only way to determine its ingredients is if you have seen, tasted, smelled, or touched them before. The best way to ensure this is to eat as many different things as you can. Then when you try something new, you can say things like “Hrmm, this sauce tastes (or smells) like that other sauce, which was made from sage. This probably has sage.” One ingredient down. Boom!
Just Experience Sampling is only useful if you give yourself time to fully experience what you are eating. Look at your food. Smell it. When proper, touch it. Take a small bite and chew slowly, making sure the food touches all parts of your tongue. This will allow you to use all of your senses to examine it and compare it to past meals.
Just Research No matter how good your palate, you are going to run into dishes you cannot decipher. That’s when you can do some research to see what goes into that dish. Where’s the best place to research? The menu! (If you said the server because of Step 1, you get a gold star.) Many restaurants go to lengths to tell you what ingredients go into a given dish.
After that, look in cookbooks that are likely to have the dish. If you cannot find a recipe, you can look on the Internet where you are likely to find numerous variations. However, having this information is only half the battle. You are copying a specific way of making the dish, so you will need to combine the recipe with what you learned when experiencing the food.
Just Butter There’s one more thing to keep in mind. When chefs cook in restaurants, they use butter, heavy cream, salt, and other unhealthy ingredients. To make dishes the way they do, you will need to use those same ingredients, at least at first. Once you master the dish, you can work on healthy substitutions, but the first time around, use butter and cream!
There you have it. If you want your “mastered a dish you had in a restaurant badge,” you have a game plan. The good news? To be successful, you get to eat a lot and you get to make delicious food. No matter how you look at it, it’s definitely better than earning the “cooking for scream kids” badge all over again.

> Blog