CookImprov Press Kit

Q&A with Tucker Herbert

What inspired you to write CookImprov?

It's the book I wished existed. I love cooking improvisationally and kept looking for something that gave you guardrails while showing you where the flexibility lives. Also, going back to when I was a teenager, I figured out how to make salads that even salad haters would love. What I worked out was the difference between a home salad and a restaurant salad: diversity of ingredients. Balance across types: fresh vegetables, pickled vegetables, onion as a critical component, then texture from crushed nuts or a little cheese. That moves a salad from something you eat out of obligation to something you actually want.

Can you walk us through one of the frameworks?

Shakshuka at its core is eggs poached in tomato sauce. Nearly every country around the Mediterranean has a version. Israel calls it shakshuka, Italy calls it eggs in purgatory, Spain calls it huevos a la flamenca. The categories stay the same across all of them. What changes is which specific ingredient fills each slot. That tells a real story about food and culture – how much these traditions share, and how a dish can unite people who'd never think of themselves as cooking the same thing. I noticed there was no French shakshuka. So I used the framework to build one: caramelized leeks for the onion, leaning more into herbs than spices, a splash of white wine, gruyère for good measure.

I've heard you say everything is a salad. What do you mean by that?

Once you think in categories of ingredients, you can see almost any dish as a salad with something done to it. A smoothie is a fruit salad in a blender with ice. A pureed vegetable soup is a salad you heated and blended. A sandwich is a salad between bread. Beef bourguignon is just a salad with heat, stock, and wine. The improvisational skill you build making salads transfers directly. Same muscle, bigger dishes.

Why charts and illustrations instead of photographs?

A photograph shows you the destination. A framework shows you the road. The frameworks are meant to be absorbed at a glance – you see the whole structure at once, not one line at a time. Lou's illustrations do something photographs can't: they provide symbolic inspiration rather than as one specific version of it.

What's the most interesting question anyone's asked you?

After mentioning how the book enables you to cook with whatever you have on hand, someone asked me: I've heard I could just take a picture of my fridge and have ChatGPT tell me what to cook. How is your book different from that? Both do help you cook with what's there. Otherwise they're polar opposites. Think of a spectrum. A recipe sits in the middle, giving you specific steps. An LLM telling you exactly what to make removes you from the creative process entirely. Creativity is a muscle. If it's one you want to exercise, CookImprov puts you in the director's chair with full creative control.

What's next?

CookImprov: Cocktail Creations – the frameworks applied behind the bar. Out November 17. I’m particularly excited about this next launch, as I started keeping a document of cocktails I invented in college and ultimately realized the same categorical thinking that works for salads works for cocktails. Cocktails are a great place to learn this way of thinking. Few variables, visible structure, immediate feedback: taste, adjust, taste again. It goes from the classics through tiki and mocktails, and ends with reverse-engineering drinks and inventing your own.

Contact

Tucker Herbert is available for interviews, events, and cooking demonstrations. Contact:

• Email: tucker@cookimprov.com.

• Website: cookimprov.com

• Socials: @cookimprov