This is the fourth of five skills needed for developing an intuitive ability to cook. If you missed the reason why these skills are necessary for becoming an intuitive cook, you may want to READ THIS first.
Anyone can learn how to prepare food. It isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t really take any special talent to cook healthy, good food.
All you need is some good info and a little practice. Some of food prep is just learning good information and applying it, like…
Kitchen Vocabulary
There are a number of terms and phrases used in recipes that you’ll need to understand in order to follow a recipe – especially a more complex recipe. Otherwise, you won’t know when to baste, blanche, caramelize, or cube… and that’s going to be a problem!
Note: This might be why many cooks spend their kitchen time with a glass of wine in hand. It keeps you from caring too much.
Measuring Dry vs. Wet Foods
The standard school of thought with measuring dry vs. wet foods is that you NEVER use a dry measure for liquids, or a liquid measure for dry foods. Hmm.
Honestly, I have never once noticed that it makes a difference one way or the other. If you fill a dry measure with water and pour it into a liquid measure, it still comes out right to 1 cup line. Of course, it’s easier to measure liquids when you aren’t filling the measure to the very top – so you don’t slosh your ingredients around and make a mess. And, it’s certainly easier to scrape off the extra flour from the top of a dry measure.
Meh. Either way. I’m no chef, I just like making good food. I eyeball it most of the time and don’t ever use a knife to scrape off the extra flour. So far, the world has not ended.
Operating Various Kitchen Tools and Appliances
Never in the history of food preparation has it been easier to learn how to cook, because never have we lived in a culture where so many people are comfortable enough in front of a camera to demonstrate everything from how to change the oil in your car, to how to caramelize onions.
Not sure how to peel a potato? YouTube.
Pro tips for using your new air fryer? YouTube.
How to clean green smoothie off your ceiling because you forgot to put the lid on your new Vitamix? You guessed it… YouTube.
I recently acquired an Instant Pot. When it arrived, I tore the box open, grabbed the owner’s manual, and started reading. I almost packed the whole thing up and shipped it right back where it came from until my niece, Emily, kindly sent me a link to a guy demo-ing the same model I had. It was so much easier to use than the manual made it sound. (Thanks Em!)
So, if you don’t know how to use something in the kitchen (or anywhere, really), turn to the internet.
Food Safety Protocols
The primary concerns regarding food safety are:
- Keeping surfaces clean and clear of bacteria from either unwashed produce, or raw meats.
- Not keeping foods past their goodness deadlines.
I’ve only ever had one nasty case of food poisoning, and that was from a Taco Bell burrito, so you can be assured, taking reasonable precautions is neither difficult nor complicated.
Now, if you’re someone who enjoys cleaning more than cooking, you can go as crazy as you want on this topic. If you just want to cook and not kill anybody, it’s enough to clean all of your kitchen tools with soapy hot water, rinse them, and keep them in a safe, dry place (like your kitchen?). Be especially careful to clean cutting boards after using them to cut raw meats. The bacteria that raw meats carry can be dangerous.
As far as freshness dates are concerned, this simple adage has always served us well: If in doubt, throw it out. Cheeky, I know, but like I said… Taco Bell.
Here are a handful of basic food safety rules to follow.
- Store raw foods below cooked foods in case they could drip onto foods you’ll eat right out of the fridge
- Store foods in covered containers
- Avoid refreezing thawed foods – don’t thaw anything until you’re ready to use it
- Check and observe the use-by dates on food products – especially meats
- Take special care with high-risk foods, like seafood, which should be used immediately after it’s purchased fresh, or thawed
- It’s a good rule to clean out the fridge once a month to make sure nothing gets pushed to the back and forgotten
Again, if you’re a real stickler and you NEED more cleaning information, I’m sure someone has written an exhaustive book about it. No judgement.
Taco Bell.
The rest of food prep is hands-on practice, like…
- Using your knives to chop, dice, cube, mince, and slice.
- Using your frying pan to sauté, brown, sear, and fry foods.
- How to stir, combine, mix, toss, blend, or fold foods together.
- And, learning how to “eyeball it”
Questions about these first three skill categories can be answered by searching and finding good tutorials online. But, remember, no amount of watching other people cook will transform you into a good cook. The skills aren’t difficult or time-consuming to learn, but getting over that inertia of couch-potato-ness is the first step.
Eyeballing It
Nothing will get you closer to feeling more confident in your kitchen than learning this skill, and it’s not hard to do at all! There are only two considerations when eyeballing foods:
First, know which foods are okay to eyeball. If you’re baking a cake, you’re actually dealing with some chemical reactions, both between ingredients and during the baking process. More careful measuring is best. BUT, if you’re making pasta sauce, it’s mostly about flavor and texture, and you’ll find you’ve got some room to wiggle.
Second, learn how to train your eye to see how much food takes up how much space.
How much salt is 1 teaspoon? Easy. Just measure out 1 teaspoon of salt, then pour it into the palm of your hand. Take a good look at it – how much of your palm does it cover? How deep is it? Now try pouring some salt right into the palm of your hand, then measure it. Were you close?
To eyeball liquids, especially when only a small amount is needed (like vanilla), I’ll often use the cap to the bottle. A small bottle, like for extracts, has a cap that measures about ½ a teaspoon, so when I’m using vanilla, rather than dirty up a teaspoon, I’ll just use the cap to measure it out. I know it’s just a teaspoon, but cutting out enough of these small steps adds up to less time cooking and less time cleaning up afterward.
You can learn how to eyeball measurements quickly by intentionally measuring and comparing foods, but it’s also something that will just happen as you spend more time preparing foods.
Remember, the more time you spend in your kitchen, learning about food, the more confident you’ll be when you need to make something on the fly.
Let’s talk next about the fifth and final skill – the cooking part of cooking!
