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One of the things I do when cooking is I look at several different recipes for the same dish. I take a "base" recipe "A" and add these ingredients from recipe "B" and maybe even a unique ingredient from recipe "C." By doing this I often get the best of all the recipes I am combining.

A friend of mine said that she thought my cooking was "fusion" is this the right term?

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    That's just cooking. Following a recipe to the letter is just as unusual, if not more.
    – Chris H
    Commented May 20, 2017 at 6:05
  • @ChrisH I am also mixing techniques as well. For instance I made Riata, and most of the instructions said to simply grate the cucumber, but one recipe called for it to be salted & squeezed dry
    – Jesse Cohoon
    Commented May 20, 2017 at 13:14
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    A synthesized recipe, perhaps? Or a combined recipe. Or an integrated, a modified, or a researched recipe (as recipe research usually is reading several and putting them together). Might or might not be understood at-a-glance, but I think any such phrase would get the point across usefully with minimal explanation.
    – Megha
    Commented May 20, 2017 at 21:01
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    An amalgamation?
    – rackandboneman
    Commented May 21, 2017 at 2:21

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I don't know that there's really a name for it beyond "combining recipes" or more generally "modifying/changing/tweaking recipes." If your goal is to get the best of both worlds, then you could perhaps say you're trying to improve or perfect your recipe for something.

In the end, you're just making additional variations of an existing dish, presumably with the goal of finding a variation you really like. It's a really good method of doing so, and you should definitely be proud if you manage to succeed at getting what you want out of it! But you started out with raita recipes and you made another raita recipe.

If you were combining different dishes, from different cuisines in particular, resulting in a dish that couldn't exactly be described by just one original name, then fusion would be a good name, as Lorel said.

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Fusion is a great word for a thorough mixing of things, conveying the idea of almost welding them together. So I see what your friend means when she describes your fusing together of different recipes for a particular dish as fusion cooking.

But when people use the term fusion in relation to cooking they often mean the marrying together of different types of cuisine, like for example, an "Asian Fusion" style restaurant might serve dishes from a variety of different countries within Asia or dishes made with ingredients from a variety of different parts of Asia ... like maybe curry with tofu in it or, who knows, sushi with paneer? They can be as creative as they like, and it's called "Fusion".

So if your friend were to write a review of your restaurant and call it a "fusion restaurant", she might need to add a little extra explanation to avoid con-fusion.

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