Open Cuisine

Open cuisine is an approach to cooking that does not use fixed recipes. It is centered on the notion about the cooking ingredients, the relations between them, cooking procedures and creative improvisation.

The emphasis in open cuisine approach is on deconstructing recipes and understanding their ingredients and the relations between them. That enables to use the recipes in a totally different way, combining/fusing different recipes, cooking procedures and cooking styles, using different ingredients (replacing them) and adding new ingredients.

The transformation of food culture on the horizon

It is a response to recent transformations of food culture such as increased globalized interchange of ingredients, cuisines, recipes and ideas and the change in the perception of cooking. Cooking is no longer considered as labor but as creative leisure.

Additionally it is a response to a last decade's market phenomenon - craft consumer. The craft consumer is someone who transforms commodities into personalized objects. Cooking is clearly one of this transformations. Home cooks are not satisfied with only following recipes anymore. They want to engage in the recipe itself, select ingredients, define preparation in order to get their personalized object - a meal.

Open cuisine cooking approach was partly initiated and enabled also with the use of information technology that provides a faster exchange of ideas and information. For now it is limited to more experienced cooks and professionals.

Recipe generators

In future information technology will be probably used for further development in the direction of interactive recipe generators that will enable open recipe style of cooking even for the less experienced cooks. One of the first attempts in this direction is the Foodizmo project.

Eventually this recipe generators that are still in the experimental faze will probably in many ways serve as a replacement for traditional cookery books and recipe collections.