As a self-proclaimed chef, meaning I've been cooking pretty much my whole life and watch way too many cooking shows, I realized quickly that cooking can actually be very difficult.
1. "Learn the pros and cons of different cookware."
2. "Pat your meats dry before searing, and add less oil to your pan. Add the extra oil to your meat before seasoning. This allows the flavors to properly bind with the meat and also traps juices better."
3. "Most things that require water to cook can be vastly improved by adding broth or stock instead. When I’m making mashed potatoes, for example, I’ll often boil them in chicken broth before mashing. It just adds another layer of flavor. Rice is another good example."
4. "The thing that everyone should learn is to taste as you go. If you don't like the way it tastes, it's not going to magically get better when you put it on a plate."
5. "Most savory dishes need a little sourness (vinegar, citrus juice, buttermilk), and most or all sweet dishes need a little salt."
6. "Mise en place — not just for ease of preparation, but because seeing all of the ingredients laid out helps to conceptualize the goal."
7. "Learning how to sharpen a knife or finding out where you can go to get it sharpened by someone else. It makes you a faster and even better cook."
8. "Your all-clad stainless steel pots are tanks. Stop worrying about cosmetic things like scratches and burn/gas stains. Steel wool for cleaning is fine; all you need is soap, not 15 different special cleaners for whatever. You can throw it off a four-story balcony onto concrete, and it'll still be fine to cook with. You don't need it to be shiny and perfect all the time; it's a tool, not an art piece."
9. "Blanch your green vegetables before freezing or packing them."
10. "Understanding how to preheat a pan. The evenness of preheating, temperature of the surface, and heat setting of the burner are all interrelated but also separate factors you have to individually consider!"
11. "Respect the starch in the food you cook and know how to utilize it — i.e., wash your rice, parboil your potatoes before making any crispy potato dishes, and add a bit of leftover pasta water to your pasta sauce before discarding it all."
12. "When making a thickener, always use cold water. You think hot water is going to help the starch dissolve. It doesn’t. It makes little gelatin pearls you will never get out."
13. "Learn guidelines, not recipes. Once you start getting a few fundamentals down, you can mix and match flavors to make a lot more variety. It also helps if you’re like me and need to make substitutions because you forgot to pick up an ingredient. Again."
14. "Roasting is low effort, high reward. It will make that vegetable you hated as a kid into something new and wonderful, and plain ol’ chicken with bone and skin is excellent."
15. "Salt marries, fat carries. Which is to say, you can use spices and herbs, but without some salt, the flavors will not marry together and will be flat. Without a little fat, the flavors will not carry through the food or onto your palate. Things should not be salty or greasy, but without a little salt and fat, food tastes like nothing and has a flat-mouth feel."
And finally, this person shared their must-know tip for any cooks that plan to dabble in baking:
16. "Baking and any other recipes that use weight-based measurements vs. volume really require a food scale. I hated baking for a long time because nothing ever came out 'right,' and I’m not much of a sweets person anyway. Well, I ended up with a pizza maker a year ago, and in my quest to make decent pizza, I have to say a cheap food scale was the biggest game-changer by far. A food scale for baking feels as necessary as a thermometer for cooking."
Any additional cooking tips you want to give out? Let me know in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.