For me a recipe is just a description of the steps to recreate the main gist of a dish. In a dish, you have the main steps giving the most flavour, and stuff ad

For me a recipe is just a description of the steps to recreate the main gist of a dish. In a dish, you have the main steps giving the most flavour, and stuff added or swappef to enhance it. Once you understand which are the main steps giving most flavour, you can play with the rest to adapt it to your taste. Precise amount are not needed, except on the first time you make an unknown dish. For example I tried to do chocolate mousse several times, but always failed at the chocolate heating phase and incorporation to the egg mousse, even though i followed the recipe to the letter. I kept failing until someone told me that the main steps is to have the chocolate liquid while cool (she used coffee for this), and that incorporation need to be done gently. Since then i never failed at it, and replaced chocolate with fruits, without following a recipe.