LESS INGREDIENTS. BIGGER IDEAS: What Cooking Has Taught Me About Learning, Creativity, and Leadership…

Cooking may put dinner on the table. But if you pay attention to what happens along the way, it can teach you considerably more.

Many people just see cooking as switching on a hob, and bubbling some food in a pan…But it’s more…

Over the past few months, something rather unexpected has happened in my kitchen.

I started experimenting with relatively simple ingredients. Sausages. Mince. Tinned fish. SPAM. Noodles. Rice. Kale. Mushrooms. Garlic. Chillies. Tinned soups. Olive oil.

Nothing particularly extraordinary.

Yet the fewer ingredients I seemed to use, the more ideas I began to have about what I could do with them.

A tin of mushroom soup stopped being merely soup and became a sauce. Breadsticks became a crunchy topping. Cornflakes became a coating. Green tea became an earthy seasoning. SPAM went from something you might simply slice and fry to burgers, crispy pieces and eventually what I started calling SPAM fritter croutons.

Some experiments were excellent. Some were merely okay.

And gradually I realised I wasn’t simply learning how to cook.

I was learning how to learn.

That is perhaps the bigger story behind my WOK UNDERDOG experiments.

The Basics Don’t Imprison You

I’ve heard the same lesson repeatedly through another passion of mine: snooker.

The basics will always win.

Keep your head still. Build a firm bridge. Deliver the cue smoothly. Don’t rush. Understand the fundamentals before trying to become clever.

Cooking increasingly feels the same.

Take Aglio e Olio. At its heart it is an extraordinarily simple idea built around pasta, garlic and olive oil, commonly with chilli or pepper depending on the preparation.

But simplicity doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn.

Understand how garlic behaves in oil. Understand temperature. Understand how the oil coats the carbohydrate. Understand seasoning and timing.

Once you’ve grasped those things, something interesting happens.

The basics stop restricting you and start setting you free.

I began making my own interpretations. Noodles instead of pasta. Sausage. Greens. Crushed breadcrumbs. Even tiny amounts of green tea, which brought an unexpected earthy quality.

One sausage version reached 4½ out of 5 on my own admittedly unscientific scoring system.

Eventually I went further and substituted rice.

At that point I couldn’t really claim I’d made Aglio e Olio anymore.

But that wasn’t failure.

I had used something Aglio e Olio had taught me to create something different.

That’s an important distinction.

There is a world of difference between changing something because you don’t understand the original and changing something because you do.

My cooking philosophy consequently became:

Learn the basics. Treat them with care and respect. Then don’t be afraid to tinker.

The basics aren’t a prison.

They’re a foundation.

Observation Might Be the Most Underrated Skill

Cooking has also reinforced something I’ve increasingly come to believe about learning generally.

Watching and observing aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Watching tells you what happened.

Observation asks why.

Why did the meat become dry?

Why did the breadcrumbs become nutty?

Why did the noodles absorb that sauce so well?

Why did the garlic become bitter?

Why did one combination leave me pleasantly satisfied while another, equally delicious combination, leave me feeling I’d eaten far too much?

That last question became particularly interesting during my recent experiments.

I made creamy tomato-and-mushroom noodles with kale, chilli, Thai basil and crispy SPAM fritters on top.

It was delicious.

4½ out of 5.

Yet something wasn’t quite right.

The sauce was rich. The battered SPAM was rich. Individually, both worked beautifully.

Together?

Perhaps too much.

That taught me something.

Improvement Isn’t Always About Adding

When you first start experimenting creatively, there’s a temptation to ask:

What else can I add?

Another sauce?

More seasoning?

Cheese?

Another texture?

Another ingredient?

Increasingly, I’m asking the opposite question:

What doesn’t need to be here?

That may actually require greater judgement.

If an ingredient already provides salt and umami, do I really need soy sauce?

If cream provides richness, does it need cheese?

If the protein is heavy and crispy, would a lighter sauce create better balance?

If a sauce is already powerful, perhaps the protein doesn’t need to shout as well.

My next meal reinforced that lesson.

I cooked beef mince with a chilli con carne-style sauce, onions, chillies and peas. I originally intended to serve it with rice, but changed my mind and used noodles.

It was simple.

It was delicious.

Another 4½ out of 5.

Yet unlike the creamy SPAM dish, I finished it feeling satisfied rather than overwhelmed.

Same rating.

Very different eating experience.

That matters.

A good meal isn’t simply one that tastes good during the first three mouthfuls.

It needs balance.

Less Ingredients. Bigger Ideas.

That experience helped me understand what WOK UNDERDOG was becoming.

For months I hadn’t actually been cooking with enormous numbers of ingredients.

Quite the opposite.

I had been returning to many of the same things and asking what else they could do.

And eventually the philosophy reduced itself to four words:

LESS INGREDIENTS. BIGGER IDEAS.

That doesn’t mean deliberately making food basic or bland.

It means becoming more imaginative with what you already have.

A tin of soup doesn’t necessarily have to remain soup.

A breadstick doesn’t have to remain a snack.

Cornflakes don’t have to remain breakfast.

Green tea doesn’t necessarily have to remain a drink.

And SPAM certainly doesn’t have to remain a pink rectangle sitting forlornly beside some chips.

Once you start thinking like that, ingredients become possibilities rather than instructions.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t always be:

“What do I need to buy?”

Perhaps sometimes it should be:

“What haven’t I thought of doing with what I’ve already got?”

That’s creativity.

But it’s also resourcefulness.

And that’s where cooking starts escaping the kitchen.

Cooking Teaches You to Make Decisions

Every experimental meal contains uncertainty.

I don’t know for certain whether something will work before I cook it.

I can draw upon previous experience.

I can understand the ingredients.

I can predict.

But eventually I have to make a decision.

Green tea in breadcrumbs?

Cook the bugger and see.

Tomato soup mixed with mushroom soup?

Cook the bugger and see.

SPAM fritters used like croutons?

You get the idea.

Behind the slightly ridiculous slogan is a perfectly serious learning process:

OBSERVE → UNDERSTAND → DECIDE → TRY → EVALUATE → ADAPT

And isn’t that something we do throughout life?

We rarely possess perfect information.

We learn what we can, make the best judgement available to us, act, observe the consequences and adjust.

That applies to cooking.

It applies to sport.

It applies to business.

It applies to leadership.

Cooking and Leadership

I’ve recently been reading about leadership, and I’ve begun noticing another unexpected crossover.

Leadership isn’t simply about knowing the answer.

Sometimes it’s about making sensible decisions when you don’t yet know the answer.

Cooking teaches that surprisingly well.

You work with the resources available.

You understand the fundamentals.

You make decisions.

You respond when circumstances change.

You learn from feedback.

You recognise when something isn’t working.

And perhaps most importantly, you don’t become so emotionally attached to your original decision that you refuse to change it.

I’ve cooked dishes I’d rate 3/5.

That’s useful.

The experiment hasn’t insulted me.

It has given me information.

What worked? What didn’t? What would I change?

That is feedback.

And feedback without ego is an enormously useful skill.

A leader who believes every original idea must be defended simply because it was theirs eventually stops learning.

Sometimes the intelligent response is:

“That didn’t work. What did it teach us?”

Which brings me to another philosophy I’ve taken from snooker:

WIN & LEARN

I increasingly prefer that to win or lose.

Cooking Is Coaching

Somehow, no matter where these conversations begin, I keep finding my way back to coaching.

Even through SPAM.

But perhaps there’s a reason.

Good coaching doesn’t merely tell somebody what to do.

Ultimately, it should help them become capable of making decisions without the coach.

At the beginning, a student asks:

“What should I do?”

Later:

“Why does this work?”

Eventually:

“I think this might work.”

That’s progress.

Nobody instructed me to crush green tea with breadcrumbs and fry it in olive oil.

I’d learned enough about the ingredients and techniques to think:

This might be interesting.

Then I tried it.

That’s the transition from instruction to judgement.

And perhaps the ultimate objective of good teaching isn’t to produce somebody who can perfectly reproduce what the teacher does.

It’s to give somebody sufficient understanding to eventually say:

“I’ve got an idea.”

Six Skills From One Wok

Looking back, I can identify at least six skills these experiments have strengthened.

Observation — paying attention to what actually happens rather than merely whether I liked the result.

Fundamentals — understanding basic techniques well enough to build upon them.

Creative problem-solving — finding new uses for ordinary ingredients.

Balance and restraint — learning that taking something away can improve a dish.

Experimentation — becoming comfortable with uncertainty and occasional failure.

Transferable thinking — taking something learned in one situation and applying it somewhere completely different.

But perhaps all six belong underneath one larger skill:

Learning how to learn.

And that brings me to something I’ve only really come to appreciate in my forties.

Becoming a Student of Life

I used to think of learning in categories.

You learn journalism.

You learn snooker.

You learn cooking.

You learn business.

But life doesn’t seem to work quite so neatly.

Something you learn at a snooker table can become useful in a kitchen.

Something you learn while cooking can make you think differently about leadership.

Something observed on a television programme or you observed in a family, can sit quietly in your memory for years before circumstances suddenly give you a reason to use it.

Knowledge travels.

Experience accumulates.

One lesson connects with another.

Perhaps we spend decades gradually building a library without knowing which book we’re going to need next.

That’s why I increasingly think of myself not simply as a student of snooker, cooking or writing.

I’m a student of movement and growth…

And I hope that education never finishes.

The Bigger Picture

Cooking is obviously practical.

We need to eat.

But cooking can also be creative, analytical and educational.

It can teach patience.

Timing.

Observation.

Resourcefulness.

Decision-making.

Restraint.

Confidence.

Adaptability.

Creativity.

And perhaps even leadership.

The meal eventually disappears.

The skills don’t.

That’s why the biggest thing WOK UNDERDOG has given me isn’t a particular recipe.

It’s a way of approaching problems:

Learn the basics.
Respect them.
Observe carefully.
Use what you’ve got.
Try something.
Pay attention to the result.
Keep what works.
Learn from what doesn’t.
And eventually, trust yourself enough to create something of your own.

Or, to put the whole philosophy rather less grandly:

LESS INGREDIENTS. BIGGER IDEAS.

And when you’re still not sure?

Cook the bugger and see.