Bay Area Chef Paul Bertolli cooked “…food grounded in a tradition, yet enlivened by the act of greeting the process and the ingredients anew.”
In his cookbook, “Cooking By Hand,” he talks about using restraint in his cooking. Insisting that knowing what not to add is just as important as knowing what to add.
Knowing traditions gives you a starting point. An understanding of why a particular dish works and exists.
It gives you something to improve upon.
When I was first starting out I focused on making classic dishes as close to the original as I could get. This gave me a firm foundation and the restraint of not adding ingredients that “didn’t belong” allowed me to focus on technique and proper seasoning without having to worry about innovation.
Ligurian pesto, beef bourguignon, bolognese. Learning recipes like these were just as important as learning the mother sauces and basic knife skills in culinary school.
Nowadays I focus on ingredients I can find locally and use classic recipes as a reference for how I can use them. I love swapping ʻulu for potatoes in chowder, using local venison in place of beef for steak tartare or grating dried aku over a bowl of buttered spaghetti instead of bottarga.
But, without knowing the original version of these dishes I would of never thought to do those things.
Keep your new ideas close and traditions closer. The sky is the limit with cooking when you start from the beginning.