Challenge Yourself with Recipe Bingo

So you’ve been cooking for a while, and you’ve got a great collection of dishes under your belt. You’ve probably found recipes and dishes that you can cook in your sleep – favorite dishes that you will always turn to should you be in need of a quick, tasty snack. What’s next for a budding chef such as yourself? It’s experimentation and innovation, of course. The journey of every chef is the same: you master recipes, and then begin to create some yourself. But how does one even start?

Simply replacing an ingredient in a recipe hardly counts as making a recipe your own. Instead, you need to tap into the knowledge you’ve accumulated in your time in the kitchen to be able to create something unique, and for this, you may want to use a fun, simple bingo game. Bingo has been adapted by various institutions in the past, with Copenhagen Street Food introducing Big Tasty Bingo to try and draw crowds in. Chefs have also been enjoying monthly Cook Offs through Gala Bingo, where they compete to deliver the best-looking rendition of a dish posted by the bingo service in hopes of winning gift cards and a cook book.

Home chefs who want to begin experimenting can also use bingo to try and challenge themselves. The game is actually quite simple: make a list of 25 different ingredients – these can be anything you like, be they ingredients you use often or ingredients you have yet to try, but it’s best to at least be familiar with the taste that these ingredients can impart on a dish. Once you’ve got your list together, jump into a free bingo card generator service like Print-Bingo.com to arrange the ingredients in a bingo card, numbering each item on the column from 1-5. Next, roll a die for each row, taking note of the ingredient that corresponds to the number you rolled – should you roll a six, then feel free to choose any ingredient you want from the row.

By the end of the game, you should have 5 ingredients, which you need to use in the next dish that you make. By experimenting with various flavors and understanding how one ingredient can be used in a myriad of ways, you can expand your expertise and hopefully even create a dish that’s uniquely your own.