Everyone longs for decadent mouth-watering meals that can satisfy more than hunger. But navigating a kitchen as a beginner can be pretty intimidating. There are so many different utensils, cookware, recipes, and cooking techniques out there that making any meal for the first time can be challenging.
Fortunately, these practical tips will help you get started. With this helpful advice, you’ll be able to treat yourself to all your favorite meals in no time.
Kit Out Your Kitchen
Before you can start looking at recipes and gathering ingredients, your kitchen must have everything you need. Because you will need quite a few things, like a skillet, chopping board, kitchen knives, a saucepan, and several others, it’s worthwhile to read through an extensive list of kitchen essentials.
Always Use Sharp Knives
If you don’t keep kitchen knives, like the those found on this site, sharp, you might end up ruining recipes because you won’t be able to slice and dice any ingredients properly. With this, investing in a set of high-quality kitchen knives and a sharpening tool like a whetstone or honing steel is wise.
Read The Recipe
You might feel tempted to skim the recipe and absorb keywords like key ingredients and cooking times. However, your meal won’t turn out right if you don’t read the entire recipe. Most recipes will start with the ingredients in relevant measurements and move on to describe the steps. It’s essential to read the recipe before gathering your ingredients.
Avoid Substitute Ingredients
While there are some instances when substituting ingredients can work well. But as a beginner cook, you should avoid this. Changing even one ingredient in a recipe can have disastrous or disappointing results.
Taste-Test While Cooking
While you are working your way through a recipe, it’s essential to season your foods and taste-test before serving. Taste testing is often the only way to know if you have added enough herbs and spices. Even when following recipe measurements, you should still taste-test for preference.
Don’t Leave The Kitchen
Some foods have substantial cooking times, like chicken. But this doesn’t mean you should relax in the living room while your roast chicken cooks in the oven. Regardless of what you are cooking, paying attention is crucial to avoid burning, boiling over, and other disasters that will ruin your meal.
Never Improvise When Baking
It’s perfectly fine to improvise when cooking; you might want to add more salt, spice, or a few more ingredients to change things up. But you should never try improvising when baking. Baking requires precise measurements for recipes to work. Always follow baking recipes as they are.
Learn Cooking Techniques
Deep frying, braising, roasting, stewing, broiling, steaming, sauteing, and poaching are a few cooking techniques that offer different taste and texture results. With this, when you find a recipe that you want to try, look for the recommended cooking techniques. If the recipe does not elaborate on any suggested method, it’s wise to do a bit of reading to figure out how to perform the technique.
