Do chefs use other people's Recipes

Travis,

For a "leg up" for culinary school, get a job, even dishwasher, in a restaurant near you, NOT FAST FOOD, but a "real" restaurant, so you can experience first-hand what it is like in th business.

IMHO, VERY few chefs create new dishes. The majority of the restaurant business is reproducing identical dishes in a fast, efficient manner with an extremely high degree of consistency.

Chefs have been using some of the same recipes and giving them a twist since the dawn of cooking. One caveman made oysters on the clubbed shell..then some innovative caveman added clubbed lemon squeeze.

It's been made or done and forgotten and remade again.......so what? people still have to eat.

if you haven't tried it then it's worth trying (within reason). Taking recipes off the internet is only amatuerish if you can't spot obvious flaws, no binder for doughs in a bread recipe, too much salt or other spice on another dish.

Take Pete's advice and get a real job in a real kitchen, then see if you have the call for culinary school.

I agree with our chefs here.  Restaurants usually serve a variation of a dish, so you are right about the "added twist".  Incidentally, I am not a chef but learned how to cook by watching our chefs in action :)

Can you get in as a bus person or dishwasher?  My daughter is only 14 and she works at the same place as I do busing tables.  One of her friends is the same age as her and she works as a dishwasher at another place in town.   I know you want to be in the kitchen, but if they have the rule that you have to be 18 before they will consider you, then try another way of getting yourself in the door.

Who said anything about an internship? get a JOB. who said Outback? they will teach you to grill and make salads and open sauce packs from the boil-in-a-bag-maker.

Contact Country Clubs, and Restaurants. not cheap chain food places but real Restaurants. Even a small independent can teach you some excellent dishes and cooking techniques.  Look at Yelp to find a good restaurant near you.

To me, I consider a cook/chef to be accomplished when they do have enough experience to create a dish on their own. Since humans have been cooking for thousands of years, there aren't a whole lot of techniques that are really "new", but I suppose that's why the whole molecular gastronomy fad gets some attention, until recently that hadn't been done to the degree it is now, even though cooking has always involved some degree of alchemy.

One of the reasons I fell in love with cooking, was the fact that it is both technical and artistic. You cannot escape the fact that composing a dish is much like composing any other piece of art, striving for balance in textures, flavors, and colors. At the same time, one can imagine beautiful artwork in their mind, and without the technical knowledge of how to execute that vision, nothing will come of it.

Much like an artist must practice their technique, sketching thousands of times, trying new approaches, new paints, new canvas, new types of lenses or film, etc. you must practice. This is to me where a recipe can help, it gives you a framework to start with, but you shouldn't limit yourself at all to that framework. Study a recipe and ask yourself "why is this successful, what techniques are required to make it successful?". Over time, you will have enough knowledge to construct your own frameworks and when you have, your creativity can really be unleashed.

When we talk, we typically talk proportions or lists of ingredients or techniques....most cook's recipes for other cooks are short.  It takes into account that you know how to blanch, saute, roast, peel, cool, fold etc....there are typically few descriptions of techniques. 

Seasoning, how you use salt, how you garnish, how you combine ingredients are all individual....if you had 7 different chefs that I'm familiar with I could (probably) in a blind tasting pick out each's dishes. 

If you look at Cape Chef's dishes, Kuans, Nickos, mine, etc they'd be different....the first three were classically trained and have serious tall white hat cred....but they'd all be distinctive to that chef/cook.

No, I invented, meatloaf, Lasagna, beef stroganoff, Hamburgers, Tacos, fried chicken, and many, many, other items......................Ok, I lied, I stole them from the diner across town, darn, the cat is out of the bag.............Chef Bill

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