Learning to cook is an essential life skill, that impacts your health, your finances, and your day-to-day quality of life. Mastering some basic cooking techniques means you can stop relying on recipes and start cooking with freedom. Learning to cook means you understand how ingredients change when they’re heated, how flavors can be layered and developed, and how the clock impacts the final texture of your dish. In this article, we’ll cover the basic cooking techniques that every home cook should master.
Thermal Energy and Heat Transfer Concepts
Everything in cooking revolves around heat. Mastering the heat is one of the most critical cooking techniques to master. You use high heat to sear and brown food. Medium heat helps you cook food uniformly without charring it. Low heat is perfect for simmering or melting something that is temperature sensitive.
Cooking surfaces and equipment heat differently. If you’re using gas, it’s easy to quickly adjust the heat. If you’re using electric or induction, the heat takes a while to decrease. Knowing the characteristics of your equipment can help avoid issues such as a raw interior or burnt exterior.
Cutting Safety and Sharp Knife Use
Having good knife skills makes you more efficient and safer. A sharp knife takes less pressure to slice through ingredients so you have less of a chance of the knife slipping. Plus you should be holding your knife correctly and having your fingers curled under as you slice, so your hands should be out of harms way.
Mastering the fundamental cuts like chopping, slicing, dicing and mincing can help streamline preparation, resulting in uniform pieces that cook evenly for better texture and flavor in the finished dish.
Chopping Up Ingredients Prior to Use
The reason to prep everything is because it makes the cooking process much easier. Now that all the ingredients are washed, measured, and cut, you can give your full attention to actually cooking. You’re much less likely to make errors because you’re in a rush or distracted.
Knowing how to treat ingredients also helps. Salt can make vegetables weep, meat should be brought to room temperature, and herbs should be added in the last minutes of cooking to preserve flavor.
Basic Cooking Techniques
The technique you choose affects the flavor, texture and appearance of the food. Having knowledge of and knowing when to employ a cooking technique allows you to have more control over the food you cook.
Boiling & Simmering
Boiling involves a lot of heat and big bubbles, whereas simmering involves lower heat and smaller bubbles. Simmering is preferred when you’re making soup, sauces, and grains, as it ensures they will cook more evenly and won’t be destroyed.
Stir Frying and Pan Frying
These cooking methods require a brief cooking time in a small amount of fat over medium to high heat. Sautéing is used for vegetables and small cuts of meat, whereas pan-frying yields a golden brown crust and full flavor from the Maillard reaction.
Oven Roasting and Baking
A dry-heat cooking method where foods are cooked in an oven. Roasting brings out the natural sweetness within foods such as vegetables and meats as their natural sugars caramelize. Baking is a more controlled process where precise measurements are important, as in baked goods like breads, pastries and cakes.
Ib. Seasoning and Flavor Building
Salting your food at the end of the cooking time isn’t seasoning. Salting brings out the flavors of your food and should be done in stages while you cook. Taste as you go to keep things in check so they don’t become too salty.
And there are the other factors, like acidity, richness, herbs and spices. Acidity picks up a dish, richness makes things taste luxurious, herbs add freshness if added early and warmth if added late. Knowing the function of these helps you balance things out without needing recipes.
Cooking Sequence & Timing
Much of cooking is about timing. Ingredients are added in a specific order so that they all complete cooking at the same time. Hard vegetables take longer than soft vegetables, meats need to rest to retain juices, etc.
When you get the hang of doing several things at once without having to speed, you can use the time that things are simmering to get your ingredients prepared for your next task. You learn how this all flows as you go along.
Mistakes to Watch Out For as a Newbie
One of the biggest mistakes that novices make is overfilling a pan, which drops its temperature and results in steaming rather than searing. If you’re cooking in batches, you’ll avoid this issue. A second error is stirring or shaking the pan too much, which doesn’t allow food to develop its nice brown crust.
Not tasting throughout the cooking process can also result in a dish that tastes bland or off. As you taste along the way, you’re able to season gradually without having to make adjustments at the end.
However, it’s easy to lose sight of that when you haven’t had the chance to practice yet. So what’s the best way to boost your confidence? PRACTICE!
The more you cook, the more comfortable you’ll become. No one likes mistakes, but they happen, and sometimes they can be instructive. Even with mistakes, you will be learning each time you cook.
With those skills under your belt, you can begin to improvise, swap out ingredients and play with recipes to your liking. You start to cook by decision rather than by rote.
The Importance of Cooking Fundamentals
Knowing the basics of cooking just makes life easier, less expensive in the long run and even healthier because you aren’t relying on so many convenience foods. It also feels great to know you can take care of yourself in another way, and of course it’s nice to have that freedom to create and experiment.
The beauty of learning those skills is that they provide a starting point to expand your horizons in the future, whether that means trying new dishes or even just getting faster and having more fun in the kitchen at home.