HOW THE ASIAN KITCHEN REJECTS THE TYRANNY OF TEASPOONS (A.K.A. THE CARNAL ART OF INTUITIVE COOKING)
- Jan Writer
- Nov 9, 2024
- 5 min read
Trigger Warning: The following essay contains scenes of unsupervised cooking that some viewers may find disturbing. Professional chefs and culinary experts are advised that this content includes unrestrained seasoning, disregard for measurements, and references to “bahala na” cooking methods that could cause significant mental discomfort. Viewer discretion is advised—especially if you're sensitive to “tantya-tantya lang” techniques, reckless soy sauce splashes, and the unapologetic rejection of precision.
“Let me tell you, there’s a romance to the chaos.”
“Recipe” is a bit of a dirty word in my mother’s kitchen. As a kid, I’d watch her hurl a fistful of salt into a bubbling pot of broth, one eye closed as if tasting it with her soul. There was no counting here, no leveling off cups of flour. It was a witch’s brew, an exorcism of flavors, a kind of feral alchemy handed down from ancestors who likely invented more dishes than any cookbook could catalogue.
And yes, my mother’s chicken adobo, under a wild, unmeasured splash of vinegar, would put Michelin-starred dishes to shame. Because you can’t measure flavor. Not like that. Not with cups and spoons. Not with a white-knuckled death grip on “perfection.”
Asian cooking, you see, is about courting chaos, letting go, and embracing flavor with arms open wide like lovers falling into bed.
But here’s the problem. Western cooking schools—those prim temples of measurement and precision—have infiltrated our lives with this nonsense that every flavor can be subdivided and split into the prison of measurements. And so we have the Western way: a kingdom where culinary conquest is marked by tablespoons and grams, where chefs clutch their ladles like they’re holding their last dime.
Let me tell you: this is madness.
Take a moment with that idea. Let it simmer, because here’s where I’m going to piss off a few people: measuring cups and teaspoons are the training wheels of the culinary world, the water wings in the deep end of a pool that’s meant to drown you with possibility.
Did anyone tell Vincent van Gogh to "measure" his strokes? No. He fucking drowned himself in paint. He slathered his own madness across canvases. Would he have measured the yellows in "Sunflowers" by the tablespoon? And yet, here we are, with half the world telling us to carve our ginger “1 inch thick” like a dental implant. What happened to taste? Where is that wild, greedy plunge into flavor?
“Cooking isn’t a science, it’s a lustful ritual.”—though I doubt you'll find that in the words of some bearded French chef who thinks himself a god because he juliennes onions perfectly. I dare any of them to face down a wok under blistering heat, flames licking the metal’s sides, with a mere flick of soy sauce to guide them.
It's a fight, not a fucking formula.
And this, you understand, is the crux: Asian cooking doesn’t just ignore measurement—it dares to seduce with its own, unruly rhythm. If Western cooking is a sterile marriage bound by ironclad prenups, Asian cooking is a passionate affair on the floor, no rules, just sweat and instinct.
But let’s talk specifics, lest I be accused of overgeneralizing. Michael Pollan in his book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation pointed out that cooking is the closest many of us get to alchemy. He wasn’t wrong, but I would argue he stopped short of the real point. He still clings to measurements as though they hold some mystic key, as if garlic is enhanced through micrograms.
Bullshit.
No one in my grandmother’s kitchen knew what a teaspoon was, let alone considered using one. She would use “enough.” She would laugh in the face of precision, scorn the snobbish gospel of culinary scales. Because to the seasoned Asian cook, the entire idea is absurd. You don’t calculate flavor; you feel it, you live it, you season like you’re throwing salt on the wound of life itself.
Western culinary orthodoxy has brainwashed generations into believing that measurements are some kind of sacred ritual. Read Julia Child and what do you get? “1 cup flour,” “1 teaspoon salt,” “2 cloves garlic.” Sterile, uniform, joyless precision.
And that’s what they teach: cooking as a laboratory experiment, as though the wrong pinch of something will explode. It’s cooking under duress, with measurements wielded like a chastity belt—designed to keep the “art” out.
And here lies the great, unwashed irony: all this time, Western culinary snobs have looked down their powdered noses at “street food” and the grit of “foreign flavors,” as if having sauce on your fingers was akin to barbarism.
But guess what? These are the flavors that linger in memory, the ones that stick to your soul like grease to a pan.
We’re talking about two philosophies at war. One believes you should enter the kitchen as a monk, clean and antiseptic, hands washed and soul tethered to control. The other—my philosophy, the Asian way—wants you in there like a marauder. Come in half-drunk, furious, laughing. Cook like you’ve got nothing to lose.
I challenge anyone to consider which approach produces the meal that sings in your blood.
In the 1970s, French philosopher Roland Barthes observed in Mythologies how bourgeois culture had begun fetishizing cuisine. He noted that the act of transforming ingredients was becoming a way for the bourgeoisie to display their refinement. If he’d lived a little longer, maybe Barthes would have seen it too: the creeping in of teaspoons, the ugly fetishization of precision as if culinary ecstasy could be measured out like a prescription. Barthes would have raged against this reductionist mockery, this tyranny of tablespoons. Because when we cook with rules, we forget what food is meant to do: it’s meant to mess us up. It’s meant to leave us licking our fingers, cursing the spiciness, crying from the heat.
Food is meant to be alive, damn it.
Now, I can already hear some precision-loving souls clutching their mise en place trays and murmuring about molecular gastronomy, as though arranging your basil leaves just so could bring enlightenment. And to them, I say this: the flavor you’re looking for is never going to be on a chart. It’s in the dirt. It’s in the chaos.
The monks of the East did not meditate over precise recipes; they focused on mindfulness, awareness, presence. Zen Buddhism, a philosophy that has woven its way into so much of Asian life, teaches us to engage wholly in each action. Pouring soy sauce. Tossing scallions. Tasting, feeling. Measuring, ironically, has no place in true Zen, for it suggests a lack of faith in one’s instincts.
And instinct, you see, is everything.
And while I’m at it, let me just say this: nothing makes my blood boil like someone with their head buried in a cookbook, “following along.” The recipe is a suggestion, a loose mutter from the gods of taste. If you want to cook by rote, by numbers and teaspoons, you are forfeiting the divine pleasure of failure.
Yes, failure.
Food is supposed to be messy. It should spill and scald and surprise. To cook is to court disaster, and in that, to meet glory.
So the next time you enter the kitchen, leave the measuring cups in the drawer. Bring your rage, your lust, your wild heart. That’s the Asian way. And the world, so starved of flavor, so tightly bound in teaspoons and cups, has forgotten how good food can be when you just. Let. Go.
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