Have you noticed the ubiquity of the phrase “restaurant-quality meals at a home”?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat like I do at a restaurant every day. It’s no secret that if you add a bunch of butter and salt to your food it’ll taste amazing. It’s also no secret after a few meals of restaurant food you’ll start to feel bloated and sick. There are also techniques that, while they produce a great result, are not practical for the home cook.
At risk of sounding pedantic, in order to be a better cook, you must define what a good cook is. Being a good cook is not the same as being a good chef and what defines the former is more subjective than the later. A good cook knows how to make satisfying meals that are both tasty and appropriate for the situation, knows the rhythm of their home life and can make a great meal without an insane amount of mess. To me, a good cook is someone who can confidently feed themselves, and can do so tailoring to their health, budget, taste and skill.
So how do you become a better cook?
It’s a topic that came up the other night over dinner with a couple friends, where we talked about the barriers of entry to becoming confident home cooks. One of us had gotten the cooking bug during the lockdown while another one of us was frustrated that even following recipes requires a baseline skill set that is not neceesarily intuitive. While I was the one at the table with the most experience cooking as a hobby, I had to admit it was years before I could say I was confident in my skills. My tips are a result of years of practice. This is not a list of kitchen “hacks” ,nor is it list on how to make “restaurant-quality food”. This is simply a list of tips I would have tell anyone trying to learn how to cook, accumulated over many years of cooking and just as many years making tons of mistakes.
Know when use the good stuff
A lot of guides will say always buy the best ingredients you can afford. With grocery prices the way they are, I say a good cook knows when to splurge and when to save. Instead of going ham on the best stuff, buy what’s most appropriate for the application.
As a good rule of thumb, the shorter the ingredient list, the better quality ingredients you want. A shortbread cookie has a short list—butter, sugar, flour. Since butter is the predominant flavor, I want to splurge on the fancy cultured European stuff. An oatmeal chocolate chip cookie, on the other hand, has so much going on that you won’t notice the store brand butter.
Think also about heat and how it affects food taste and texture. Many ingredients lose a lot of the subtleties that make them special once exposed to heat. Fancy olive oil loses a lot of its fruitiness after heating—save it for salad, not cooking. Expensive cheese is great for a cheese board or shaved to finish a pasta dish, but you’re not going to get your dollar’s worth putting it in mac and cheese. Are your tomatoes perfect? Use it in a caprese. Not so perfect? Cook it into a sauce.
Salt Smarter, not harder
The common advice you read guides about improving cooking is that you need SALT SALT SALT (Molly Baz practically created an empire on the idea). I’ll admit that I prefer my food on the saltier side. However, being a good cook is not just about making food taste good, it’s about being able to make food that makes you feel good as well, meaning that you should take health and the preferences of the people around you into consideration.
Pick a salt brand and stick to it—I’m a Morton’s kosher girl myself. Generally coarse sea salt or kosher salt is going to be easier to work with and compatible with most cooking recipes you use. All salt brands are different by weight. By being consistent with a brand, you start to build an intuition of how many pinches of salt is just right for you.
Salting as you go is also a good way to salt smarter. The purpose of salt in most dishes is to get the ingredients to taste like the best versions of themselves, not to taste salty. The best way to do this is to add a small pinch of salt as you go and taste. Sautéing onions for a sauce? Throw in a tiny pinch of salt in that step and taste to see how the onions taste. Do it again when you add the liquid, etc etc. By the time your dish is finished, you may find you may not even need to add any more salt and often I find I end up using much less salt cooking this way.
Learn the functions of the ingredients.
When you start thinking about the “why” of a certain ingredient, a lot more options open up to you. I often see a divide from people who follow recipes to the detail and people who, very proudly, declare they don’t use recipes. I think there is a happy medium where you use recipes as a guidepost for technique, cuisines or ingredients that are unfamiliar to you, but know when and how to deviate. By understanding that function each ingredient serves, you can accomplish three things: 1) Make substitutions easily based on price, availability, and seasonality, 2) Adjust recipes easily to accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences, and 3) Make recipes your own.
Take the example of a peanut. A peanut can serve various functions in a recipe. In a smoothie, the peanut is probably providing fat to make the smoothie more filling. If you don’t have peanuts on hand, you could swap in avocado, coconut oil, or whole fat dairy as a way to add that fat and creaminess back in. In a pad thai, the peanuts are there for to add a contrasting salty crunch to the silky noodles, but if you have a friend that’s allergic to tree nuts, you could add roasted sunflower seeds to mimic that texture. In a peanut butter cookie, the nut butter provides the flavor, but if you wanted to turn it into a completely different creation, you could experiment with swapping out a different nut butter (This is basically what I did with my baci di rama recipe, where I switched the traditional hazelnuts in baci di dama for pistachios).
Follow your nose
This tip is probably the hardest to implement in daily life, as it requires lots of practice. Most recipes offer visual indicators to tell if your dish is on the right track (golden-brown, no longer pink, etc). It’s much harder to describe in writing how things should smell.
I find that smells are often the best way to monitor a recipe, and even can allow me to leave the kitchen for a second and still be monitoring the progress of a dish. Canned tomatoes have a very distinct tinny smell that only goes away after cooking for a bit. I know a sauce is close to ready when I smell that difference. Similarly, cake and cookies take on the faint smell of caramel after baking for a while. I know when I smell that in the air, my baked goods are close to ready and it’s time to start paying more attention.
Unfortunately, this is a skill that just comes with practice. Next time you are cooking your dish, pay attention to how everything smells. Make a note of the sharpness the onions for your soup smell when they first hit the oil in the pot, compared to how they smell after cooking for 5 minutes. If you have something baking in the oven, observe the different phases of the smells wafting in your kitchen (first, nothing, then lots of vanilla, followed by buttery caramel). Once you get an idea of how things are supposed to smell, you can rely less on timers and hovering and more on your nose.
Annotate, Annotate, Annotate
My cookbooks and magazines are filled with my notes on each recipe—what worked, what didn’t, whether I’d make the dish again, etc. It’s hard to avoid making the same mistake if you don’t remember the mistakes you made in the first place. If someone ever becomes a secondhand owner of any of my books, they will get the bonus of knowing that the Hazelnut flan from Flavor Equation needs to be triple wrapped in foil and should be made with fresh hazelnuts and not hazelnut creamer.
If you regularly reduce the number of portions of a recipe, do yourself a favor and write the adjusted quantities on a separate sheet of paper. The extra work is worth it to prevent accidentally adding triple the amount of cayenne pepper and ruining the dish. It’s literally the only time I ever use any math skills. Keep the paper stored in the page of the cookbook so you never have to do the math again.
Enjoy yourself
This sounds corny, but hear me out. Taking care of yourself should be a pleasurable experience, or at least not a tedious one. If your dinner is going to be popcorn and wine, get yourself a Whirly Pop and some good spices and make it nice. Know what makes it good to you. After all, good cooking is in the mouth of the beholder.
In 2022 (Yes, I know we’re over 3 months in…), I’m trying out some tweaks to the newsletter. I’m taking a break on creating original recipes and will try to tailor more of the recommendations to the theme of the essay. On that note, for this month’s recommendations, I figured I’d talk about the books and magazines that made me a better cook.
Food science books are a great way to learn the hows and whys of cooking. Once you understand the science of what you’re making, a whole universe of techniques open up to you. The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt and Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat are my two favorites for really approachable, but in-depth explanations on the science of good cooking. If you really want to geek out, On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee is very dense but encyclopedic in scope. Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is another great book if you prefer recipe free cooking.
There are also books dedicated less to the science of technique and more to the science of flavor. Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma is a gorgeous book with excellent recipes to illustrate the different flavor lessons of each chapter. The Flavor Bible by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page essentially has a giant index of flavors that lists every respective good pairing you could imagine.
There are books that are more on the practical nature of cooking, that are less about recipes or being a super wonky cook, but more tips for everyday life in the kitchen. My mother gave me the small but mighty What’s a Cook to do by James Peterson while I was still in high school and I still use it constantly. It’s a great resource for those moments when you find yourself asking, “How do I properly wash a leek?” and overall an excellent gift for anyone learning how to cook. I was skeptical upon my first reading of the flashier Cooking at Home by the always hilarious Priya Krisha and David Chang, but it truly is revolutionary in how it approaches home cooking. I also particularly appreciated the effort by the authors to not define good cooking by Western standards.
If you are a beginner, budget conscious, or time constrained, books that are targeted to busy families often tend to offer straightforward recipes that are great for building confidence and skill sets. The learned how to cook from recipes from the now-defunct Everyday Food Magazine. Their three cookbooks, Everyday Food: Great Food Fast, Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast, and Everyday Food Light fed me through college and grad school and taught me a lot along the way. Similarly, the original Cake Mix Doctor by Ann Byrn was my gateway into baking and a great way to start making delicious desserts with low risk of a bad outcome.
Finally, in terms of magazines, Cook’s Illustrated always has excellent explanations of the science of all their dishes, reader tips for kitchen hacks, and solid, unbiased product and ingredient reviews (they don’t receive ads). The Basically column of Bon Appetit Magazine each issue is a great resource as well. Each issue covers a new theme (mushrooms, salt, chocolate, etc) and gives a little crash course on the subject.
As always, thanks for reading
-GiGi
Yes! The Flavor Bible is a go-to for me😍