How to Become a Good Cook

Cooking is a pure hobby since many creative minds choose to opt for it on account of their interest rather than a necessity to fill the stomach.

No matter if you like cooking for pleasure or out of boredom, whether you are a burgeoning home chef or planning to enroll in culinary school. you can do it better only when you make conscious and constant efforts to do it better.

There is always room for improvement in cooking the best of cuisines, and we would like to contribute to your journey with the following tips:

Top 10 Essential Tips to Be a Good Cook

Want to be a good cook? Follow the steps below:

1. Get your ingredients in place

This is a basic approach for skilled chefs they always make sure to haul all the ingredients near the stove so that they don’t have to run amidst cooking.

In French, it is called “ Mise en place” which means before you turn on the flame and concentrate on cooking, all the potential ingredients should be in reach of your hands and positioned by turns.

Otherwise, you may end up overcooking or completely burning your recipe while you are preparing, finding, or cutting the next ingredient.

2. Use a wooden cutting board

Since cutting is the primary step of cooking, you should cut all the vegetables as well as the regular salad on a wooden cutting board instead of a steel or plastic one. This is because wood is the kind of material that conserves the nutritional value of the food.

On the contrary, when vegetables, fruits, and nuts come in contact with any other material than wood, they lose some of the important nutrients and some more while cooking, so your prepared food is left a little healthier than expected. For this very reason, some of the chefs even suggest replacing plastic, steel, and ceramic spatulas with wooden ones.

3. Try different methods for one dish

If you are serious enough to be recognized as the best cook in your family and friends, master the art of cooking one dish in various ways with perfectly different tastes.

To make it happen, you should begin practicing with the most cooked dishes at your home. To get different recipes, search on YouTube, and I am sure every cooking channel will tell you each recipe is unique to the other, either through the ingredients or with the process.

4. Sharpen your knives weekly

If you want to be quick in cooking, you will have to be quick in cutting the ingredients, such as vegetables and meat. To cut them quickly, you need your knife to be following the swiftness of your hand movements which is only possible if the edges sharpen your knife.

You can use a whetstone or sharpening steel at home to sharpen your knives at the end of the week, or you can take them to some professional in the market who can sharpen the knives back to the point. Because it is a cause of ease in the kitchen while cooking.

5. Avoid using pre-shredded cheese

Modern recipes require the presence of cheese in almost every second recipe and the best form to use it in is shredded form. If you use a store-bought packet of shredded cheese to save time from shredding it at home, you are simply doing worse to the taste of your recipes.

This is because packed shredded cheese includes some unwanted ingredients to prevent the cheese from melting back into clumps. So when you add the same cheese in your recipe, it is not just cheese but a few other things, such as lots of starch. This results in reducing the natural taste of cheese.

6. Start with the easiest recipes

This tip is for our enthusiastic kitchen beginners who are aiming for high. Therefore, the honest advice for you people is to start from the very basic practices like boiling eggs and rice, making omelets, milkshakes, pasta, few ingredient soups, and dalgona coffee, etc. After you are pro at it, you can start doing something extra and a little lengthy.

7. Haste makes food waste

One basic fact that even professional chefs overlook sometimes is that your dish requires patience in cooking. You know, in most cases, even the two minutes Maggie takes more than two minutes.

For letting all the ingredients induce their organic taste in the recipe, you need to let the recipe cook in its steam which means leaving it alone for some time. If you do not give time to your recipe, it will not develop the perfect taste and texture with half-cooked ingredients. The ignorance of this fact accounts for the worst kind of chefs than the good ones.

8. Let your meat dry

Always before cooking, frying, and searing any meat, let it dry out completely. If you do not, the undried moisture on the surface will turn into steam when set on heat, making the meat hard instead of soft and crisp.

The best cookware to use for this matter is carbon steel.

9. Preheat your pan

You can be a beginner but should not be dumb enough to put the ingredients on a cold cookware surface. While you are assembling the required ingredients on the counter near the cooking range, place the pan or pot on a medium flame for 5 to 7 mins and then start putting in the oil afterward.

10. Put effort into dishing out

According to research, if the decoration of your dished-out recipe is up to the mark, your food will taste 45 % better than its original taste. The same is the case if you dish out good-tasting food with zero presentation

It will be 45 % less tasty than its original taste. Whether it’s just you and your partner at the table, put in some effort to make it look and feel good so it can taste good.

Conclusion

Finally, Bon Appetit to all the foody fellows who realize the value of well-cooked food at the end of a tiresome day; it works as a therapy.