Cook the Way You Want to Cook: A Home Cook's Case Against Culinary Purism

The Rule I Actually Believe In

Unless you own a restaurant, cook the way you want to cook.

That's it. That's the whole philosophy. Every other "rule" you've been told about cooking — from family elders, from food television, from chefs on YouTube, from cookbook authors, from food writers, from the comment section of any recipe blog — is optional. Most of those rules are useful. Some of them are right. None of them override what you actually like to eat in your own kitchen.

I'm not against tradition. I love tradition. I make phở with a sachet of dry-roasted spices because that's what makes phở taste like phở, and that technique has been refined over generations and is genuinely correct. But I also put carrots in my beef stock the day before, and I sauté spinach with garlic and put it at the bottom of every phở bowl I serve, because I like it that way. Neither of those choices is traditional. Neither of them makes the dish worse. They make it mine.

The home cook's job is to make food the home cook wants to eat. That's the whole assignment. There's no judge. There's no Michelin inspector at your dinner table. There's no committee of grandmothers grading your fish sauce ratio. There's just you, the people you cook for, and what tastes good.

The Rules That Are Actually Rules

Let me be clear about the rules I do follow without question, because "cook the way you want" doesn't mean "anything goes."

Food safety rules are real and non-negotiable. Chicken needs to hit 165°F internal temperature. Pork can be 145°F now, but only if you actually verify it. You don't leave raw seafood at room temperature for an hour. You don't reuse the cutting board you broke down a raw chicken on for the salad you're plating two minutes later. You wash your hands. You don't eat the cookie dough with raw eggs unless you're aware of the salmonella risk and you've accepted it. These aren't gatekeeping; these are basic harm reduction.

Some technique rules are real because the chemistry demands them. A pan sauce works the way it does because the fond from the seared meat needs liquid to dissolve it and fat to bind it. You can't skip the deglazing step and end up with a real pan sauce. You can't make a roux without flour and fat. You can't make a meringue with even a drop of yolk in your whites. These aren't preferences; they're physical facts about how cooking works. Following them isn't purism, it's just doing the thing correctly.

Beyond food safety and the small set of techniques that have non-negotiable physical requirements, every other "rule" you've ever heard about cooking is somebody's opinion, somebody's preference, or somebody's tradition. Those things can be worth respecting. They are not laws.

The Steak Example

A specific example, because the principle is more useful with one.

I've heard chefs say you should never finish a ribeye in the oven. Sear it on the stovetop, baste it with butter and aromatics, let it rest, serve. Don't put it in the oven. The oven, they argue, dries out the meat, ruins the crust, undoes the work of the sear.

I have finished ribeyes in the oven. Probably more than half of the ribeyes I've cooked at home end up in the oven for a few minutes after the sear, especially if they're thick. The steaks come out fine. The crust stays crusty. The interior comes out medium-rare. The meat is tender. I cannot tell the difference between an oven-finished ribeye and a fully-stovetop ribeye in a side-by-side blind taste, and I've tested it.

Does that mean the chefs are wrong? No. Their method is excellent. The reverse sear in the oven first, then sear on the stovetop, is also excellent. The all-stovetop method with constant basting is excellent. There are three or four legitimately great ways to cook a thick steak and they all work. The rule "never finish a ribeye in the oven" is one chef's preference dressed up as a law. It's worth understanding why that chef thinks that. It's not worth treating as gospel.

I prefer my steaks rare to medium-rare. Personally. That's what tastes best to me. If a friend over for dinner wants their steak well-done, I cook it well-done. Not because well-done is right or wrong — because that's what they want to eat. If I owned a restaurant and a customer ordered a well-done ribeye, I'd cook it well-done. They're paying. They get to decide.

That's the principle. The cook serves the eater. The cook doesn't lecture the eater.

Where Culinary Gatekeeping Gets Bad

There's a real version of food gatekeeping that bothers me, and it's worth being precise about what it is.

It's not the grandmother who tells you that you're making phở wrong. That grandmother is sharing knowledge from decades of experience and you should probably listen and then decide what to do with it. That's not gatekeeping; that's mentorship in slightly grumpy form.

The gatekeeping that bothers me is institutional. It's the food critic who can end a restaurant's career with a single review based on three visits over two months. It's the Michelin Guide, which until recently effectively pretended that the entire American midwest didn't exist. There are no Michelin restaurants in Kansas. There are very few in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska. Most of the central United States has been treated as outside the universe of "serious dining," which is a coastal assumption that doesn't survive contact with the actual food being cooked here.

The 2022 film The Menu dramatized something real about the dynamic between fine dining and the critics who shape it. I'm not endorsing where that movie's protagonist takes things — the film is satire, not a how-to. But the underlying observation about how much power a small group of critics has over restaurants, and how much that power distorts what chefs decide to cook, is accurate. Fine dining is shaped not by what diners actually want but by what wins critical approval. That's a problem when the critics are concentrated in three cities and the country has fifty states.

This same dynamic, scaled down, exists in home cooking. The internet has decided what "real" Italian carbonara contains and will gleefully mock anyone who deviates. It has decided what "real" pho looks like and will tell you you're doing it wrong if you don't follow the Hanoi-versus-Saigon orthodoxy. It has decided that finishing steaks in the oven is wrong. None of these decisions were made by a committee of working home cooks. They were made by content creators and critics, and they got repeated until they sounded like rules.

The home cook in your own kitchen owes nothing to that consensus. You owe something to the people you're feeding — including yourself. That's it.

The Restaurant I Might Open Someday

The honest reason I have strong feelings about this is that I've thought about opening a restaurant.

Not a fine dining restaurant. Not something that's trying to win critical approval. A casual American-Vietnamese restaurant — the kind of place where the menu has phở and bánh mì and gỏi cuốn next to burgers and fries, where the phở might have carrots in the broth, where the bánh mì might have a sauce that no traditional bánh mì has ever had. A place built around the food I cook at home, scaled up.

I haven't worked in a professional kitchen. I helped my dad with catering events as a kid. That's the extent of my industry experience. Someday, maybe, I'll do something with that ambition. Right now I'm cooking every night for the people I live with, and the dishes I cook are the prototype.

The food I'd serve at that hypothetical restaurant would not be traditional. It would be honest. The carrots in the phở stock would be there because they make the broth taste a way I want phở broth to taste. The sautéed spinach at the bottom of the bowl would be there because it adds something I want in every bowl. Some Vietnamese customers would tell me it isn't real phở. They wouldn't be wrong, exactly. But the food would be what it is, and the people who liked it would come back.

That's what cooking the way you want to cook actually means, when you scale it up: it means having a clear point of view, executing it consistently, and being willing to defend it without claiming it's the only valid version.

The Bottom Line

If you've never made a dish before, follow a recipe the first time. Learn the structure. Get a feel for the dish. Then start changing things. Try a different protein. Try a different vegetable. Skip the step that doesn't make sense to you and see what happens. If the result is worse, put the step back. If the result is the same or better, you've learned something.

That's how cooking actually evolves — not through reverence, but through curiosity and repetition. The traditions you respect most were themselves the result of generations of cooks adapting and adjusting until something tasted right. Continuing that process isn't disrespect. It's the same process that made the tradition exist in the first place.

The only rules worth following without question are the food safety ones and the small number of technique rules that are actually physical laws. Everything else is yours. Cook the way you want to cook. Feed the people you love. Make the food taste the way you want it to taste. The rest is noise.