Freedom in Cooking

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By Peter Gilmore

Published 2010

  • About
One of the greatest challenges for a cook is to experiment with new combinations to see what works, to develop a good palate, and to coax out and preserve the natural flavour of ingredients. Then there is the balancing act; sometimes you want to intensify the flavour through the cooking process and sometimes you want to minimise the strength of an ingredient through blending it, for the purpose of subtlety.

The freedom of cooking in Australia is that we are not bound by tradition or a set of fixed ideas of how an ingredient should be cooked, what it goes with and how it should be served. This is a double-edged sword of course, as there are many chefs who combine ingredients that should never go together, or try to force cultures and traditions together, or just throw an exotic ingredient into a classical dish to see what happens. This gave rise to the saying ‘fusion confusion’, but in the right hands this freedom is very powerful and exciting. We have to remember that when new ingredients are introduced into an established cuisine there is, of course, a lot of trial and error — who could imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes, or Thai cuisine without the chilli, yet 500 years ago these ingredients didn’t exist in these countries.