What's odd is your cousin knew that...HA!

I can't think of any epiphanies...this could be interesting though. Might discover some "best of the best" type cooking discoveries!

Minor epiphany but the meatloaf mention reminded me--Use stale bread for meatloaf or french toast casserole so the bread will absorb the liquid, DUH. I always used the freshest bread because who likes stale bread.

Yup. After first time I roasted a chicken.
TAKE OUT THE LITTLE PACKAGE OF GIBLETS IN THE CAVITY FIRST!!

Mine was more for baking, and it's probably super obvious to everyone but quality ingredients really matter. It's expensive to bake with brand name butter, vanilla, flour, chocolate etc but I've found that if I take shortcuts with cheaper or more generic products, the final results suffer. It might not be noticeable to everyone but I can tell a difference because my goal is to make the best products that anyone has ever had. ;) I shop online and take advantage of sales and stock up on the quality that I like. It's the only way I can make any kind of profit in my baking!

The other thing is how "secret" ingredients can really take a good recipe and make it something special. I have a small arsenal of things that I have thoroughly vetted out through numerous versions of recipes and I think they bring me closer to my goal!

Not my epihany but a friend's many years ago:

REMOVE THE SHEETS OF PAPER THAT SEPARATE THE SLICES OF MOZZARELLA BEFORE LAYERING IN THE LASAGNA!

My epiphany came years ago, early 1980s...when I was just out of college and a was a young single gal with a career that demanded very long hours...trying to cook dinner for my then-boyfriend. I wanted to make something really special, so I bought a cookbook and read it like a book (something that turned into a lifelong habit). I picked a recipe, then set out to buy ingredients. I had about an hour to get to the store and back and cook dinner. LOADS of time, or so I thought.

Honest to goodness...I did NOT know you could get fresh food unless you lived on a farm! I grew up eating mostly frozen or canned goods. I had no idea you could find fresh meats and produce in the grocery store!! Now what was I to do?! I'd only seen my mom pop open freezer bags or open cans! Sheesh!

I bought all the fresh ingredients, but needless to say...it took me MUCH longer than an hour to get to/from the store AND cook the dinner. I didn't have half a clue as to what I was doing. Can't remember what happened to that boyfriend...but I DID discover that there was more to the grocery store than I had ever imagined. And so began my cooking experience!

My epiphany was salt!

When I was younger, I was very self righteous about how little salt I used in my cooking. I don't remember the dish that caused me to change my mind but I do remember adding salt and thinking "Duh, It does taste better.".

I still don't use a lot of salt but when something tastes bland or boring, salt usually does the trick.

For me it was spices. As a young bride doing "real cooking" for the first time, I was all about time savings tricks and efficiency. I rejected all the painstakingly handwiritten recipes from my mom that called for fresh whole spices that had to be roasted and ground for each dish and relied heavily on premade spice mixes like channa masala in a box or packs. They are OK but do not produce amazing results that fresh spices do. The first spice that made me realize this was black pepper from kerala. The fragrance was amazing. Now I do it without a thought and have it down to a very efficient process.

An earlier epiphany was right tool for the job.. I actually thought that blunt knife was safer for a beginner cook.. A trip to ER and an experience at sur la table with a wonderful global vegetable knife helped realize that force is not necessary to cut vegetables beautifully.

Moosemac, that onion story brought back a memory of YEARS ago!!

We might have lived in our house six months or so, and the neighbor across the street needed to borrow an onion, so my mother gave her one. After she left, my mother scoffed, " Well, can you BELIEVE? I gave HER awhite onion, and she returned a yellow onion!!! I never cooked with a yellow onion in my LIFE!!'

What makes this (kind of) funny is that my mother was raised from age 3 in an orpanage, and married my father during WWII, so never had much, but felt slighted by a yellow onion!

The entire revelation that I LOVE to cook was ne epiphany! I was always an outside girl, rain, snow, sleet or hail, I was with my horses.

My other epiphany is like GWlolo, with spices. I love using whole, grinding them myself.

Nancy

Another SALT epiphany!?! Growing up, knew ya added salt to water for spaghetti, but it was always just a few shakes from salt shaker off kitchen table. When cooking shows started showing up... even back when Julia was in B&W... noticed how LIBERAL chefs were with salt. I now put SEVERAL TBSPs in pasta pot... you consume very little, but it definitely makes a difference in the flavor of the pasta, no matter what the shape.

Yes, klseiverd, just recently I am making myself add larger amounts of salt to the pasta water and it does make a difference. See, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

My Mom and cousin were like sisters. They grew up poor and the family raised their own vegetables. Yellow onions were a staple in the garden, easy to grow with a long storage life.

Nancy,
My mother thought white onions were extravagant because they were more expensive to buy and more delicate in flavor. They never grew them in the garden.

Not sure why I never made the connection when making her recipes.

My other epiphany was when I was about 10. I discovered I could distinguish the taste of individual ingredients when eating a dish. I began duplicating recipes from my tasting memory. I had so much fun! Now I find my sense of taste is not as sensitive but my experience seems to compensate.

Mine's the exact opposite of Chi83's, I'm afraid.

I ALWAYS bake with the highest quality ingredients--butter, safflower oil, good vanilla (I make my own extra strength because I cannot buy the kind of quality I want), fresh milk etc.

We all have mom's Chocolate Cake recipe--the one that's been in the family since the 50's. I even have the magazine page it came from (tattered, stained and now laminated so it doesn't deteriorate any more). But none of us have EVER been able to exactly duplicate the taste of her chocolate cake, to our great dismay.

Then 2 epiphanies.

Mine: It struck me--Mom always used the cheapest ingredients--store brand everything, and she used evaporated milk (half e.milk/half water) for baking because it was cheaper than fresh in those days. I started buying a bottle of the cheapest veg. oil, using the evaporated milk, and one less egg than the recipe called for (another of mom's cent-saving practices). My chocolate cake was much closer to the original.

My sis's--she reminded me that mom always packed the cocoa for measuring. Right, I'd forgotten and was measuring properly.

Now? That cake is practically just like mom's--as long as I remember NOT to use my best ingredients and methods, LOL.
Mind you, I won't use store brand, imitation vanilla, and the cocoa has to be Hershey's--there are some places I just cannot bring myself to scrimp at all.

Note--that recipe tastes very much like Wegman's Ultimate Chocolate Cake, btw. Judging from the ingredients listed on that, it IS very close to mom's recipe (if you ignore all the added chemicals).

This post was edited by azzalea on Thu, Jan 31, 13 at 11:13

That's funny :) There are definitely some things you can use the cheaper versions, and I find the application matters too. Store brand butter isn't nearly as noticeable within the baked good as it is in the buttercream frosting because the water content and taste matters more in that application.

I've been using King Arthur's ingredients lately and I like them a lot! But I always have some Hersheys Special Dark cocoa in my pantry.

My revelation was Crisco shortening. After buying into the studies years ago touting the dangers of hydrogenated vegetable shortening, I stopped using it and switched to butter for pie crusts and other recipes using solid shortening and went to non-stick spray or oil for greasing pans.

One day at a family gathering, my cousin said, "Ruthie, you used to make the best pies that tasted just like Nana's but the last few just haven't had the same flavor.". About the same time, I noticed a buildup of sticky goo developing on my cake and muffin pans. In a lightbulb moment, I went out and bought a can of Crisco and have been making pie crusts and greasing pans with it ever since then.

As I increased my research and collection of cooking booklets re: WWII food rationing, I realized all the work that went into developing tasty cake and cookie recipes using shortening and alternate sweeteners instead of the severely rationed butter and sugar.

I wonder how we would cope if butter and sugar were rationed again.

The biggest epiphany is probably that I love almost anything better if it is well browned. My mother didn't brown or grill and I have been making up for it since. I can't imagine putting unbrowned meat in a crock pot and wanting to eat it.
I like vegetables roasted until caramelized and crispy, nuts toasted, cheese browned, brown butter, brown sugar!....

Oh, and that almost no one I know cares that much about food except for a very few.

I used to feel compelled to make every ingredient in every dish from scratch. Making lasagna was a two day deal - make my own sauce from scratch one day, cooking down the tomatoes into sauce, making my own Italian sausage for the sauce, letting it simmer slowly all day, making my own lasagna noodles and letting them properly dry, etc. Then I'd actually assemble the lasagna and bake it the next day. My husband swore he could taste the difference if I didn't make it that way. Once, because some friends of ours came into town for a few hours unexpectedly and we invited them for dinner, I had to "invent" some quick shortcuts when they requested my lasagna. Horror of horrors...I used jarred spaghetti sauce as my base, doctored it up with store-bought sausage, garlic, peppers and onions, and threw in my usual spices and some good red wine. I used boxed noodles and quickly pre-cooked them to assemble the lasagna and get it in the oven quickly. My husband and friends raved and raved over it and not one of them knew that I had taken "shortcuts". From that day on, I only make my "from scratch" version about once a year - usually at the holidays. The rest of the time, I use the shortcut method and no one seems to be the wiser!