Amateur cooks can sometimes hit a wall as they try to improve their abilities in the kitchen. Once you know how to follow a recipe, the next step in your cooking career can be more difficult to reach. Whether you want to pursue cooking professionally or just want to make better meals for yourself or your family, you’ll need to put in some extra effort. Here, we examine what amateur cooks should know to improve their skills and give you a better jumping-off point.
Properties of Different Ingredients
Being a better cook means implicitly understanding how certain ingredients affect the overall flavor. If you know how each ingredient can change the flavor profile, you’ll always know what your dish needs to take it to the next level. Understanding different cuts of meat and how spices intermingle with one another can also give you a better perspective on how to improve your cooking.
How To Deal With Knives and Fire
For the most part, cooking isn’t a particularly hazardous pastime. However, you can’t discount the dangers in a setting where you’re interacting with sharp objects and heat sources. Of all the things that amateur cooks need to know to improve, understanding and respecting their tools is absolutely critical. Knife skills aren’t just for safety purposes; they also increase your speed when cooking and improve the consistency of the food. Fire is inevitable in cooking, so you should also know what to do if a fire gets out of control.
Preparation Timing
Many people believe that cooking takes too long to be worth the effort. The truth is that cooking doesn’t need to take very long at all, as long as you know how to prepare your ingredients and time out your meal. When you master your timing, not only will all your food finish at the same time, but it will cut down on the time you spend moving between different components of your meal.
Patience Is a Virtue
Having a lot of patience is good, regardless of what you want to do in life, but cooking can benefit from it immensely. There will be points in your cooking where you’ll simply need to leave things alone to cook or simmer or breathe. Constantly opening the oven or lifting lids on the stove will result in inconsistent cooking temperatures. The more patient you can be, the better your food will come out.