You can often hear that anyone who is able to read can cook. Which means that any person can prepare a delicious dish if he can find the step-by- step recipe. However, many cooks who truly love the process of cooking, dream to learn how to make tasty dishes intuitively, to create the symphony of taste from random ingredients that are present in their fridge, to know how to combine them correctly, and if necessary to find an adequate replacement to one of them. Are you wondering if it can be real? Appears that such ability and culinary flair is possible to develop if you know a few basic principles of cooking. There is a great book written by Pam Anderson, where the author shares her secrets and tricks that allow her to cook without any recipes, consider checking it out at some point of your learning process.

It is not possible to give up recipes right away! This process will require lots of research, practice and constant learning; at first, try to find several recipes and perfect your skills in cooking these dishes, when you already feel confident with them you can start improvising. After mastering basic compounding rules, try to cook some salad without a recipe but following advice of experienced cooks regarding the preparation of the certain salad.

It is considered that good salads must have five tastes. If you will keep this in mind you can obtain an ideal salad formula by simply adding different ingredients and trying how they taste with each other. A good salad can include sweet or sour products, green products, products with the saturated smell, green vegetables, product that contain protein and some crisp components. If you are not ready to experiment with dressing, choose any vegetable oil with a lemon and herbs. If you want to cook more nutritious salad, try to add some protein (fish, sea products, meat) and add to it some crisp ingredient, for example, chips. Or vice-versa, to create healthily and diet dish, replace meat with eggs and instead of chips add some carrot. 

First, determine what your main components are. There are tens of thousands of variations for salad, and you can use different ingredients: meat, cheese, eggs, marine products, greenery and other. Experienced cooks who cook meals several times per day don’t always follow basic rules of combining tastes, but also improvise with products that are in their fridge at that moment. Sometimes they just need to use some product because its expiration date runs out. For example, if you see that tomato and cheese that you bought last week are going to expire soon, you can prepare salad similar to Greek, but feel free to experiment and make some amendments in well-known recipes.

During the process, there is no need to hurry, gradually add all components to the dish. Also, consider experimenting with spices, try to mix new dressing with oil, salt, and different herbs; it will help you to develop your sense of portions and can help you to come up with absolutely new tastes.  

Try to taste every ingredient during the process of preparation, rather than just at the very end, maybe it will inspire you for a new combination. 

You probably know someone who likes cooking. Observe them and look how they combine ingredients, how they replace them and don’t hesitate to ask them for advice, additionally don’t be afraid to ask to write term papers if you have any questions. Another option for you is to find information on the Internet, and of course, you won’t face issues with finding answers, however, the same as with writing a college paper, advice and some tips from the real person can be more valuable, helpful and understandable sometimes.

Just like any other activity, cooking requires time and practice. Maybe your first salad, which you prepared without the recipe, won’t turn out as brilliant as you expected, and you must understand that it’s normal! Only constant practice and dedication can help you to learn how to make amazing salads without the recipe, and you can’t avoid failures, difficulties or questions on your way to perfection! Sometimes a fiasco on a kitchen turns around as success in future! For example, once you failed to make the salad of your dreams and defined for yourself what exactly you did wrong – then next time you are more likely to turn your salad into a masterpiece by taking into account previous experience! So be patient and don’t give up!

Author’s bio: Karl Wittgenstein blogger and freelance writer. During free time Karl loves to cook, he is passionate about experiments on the kitchen.