How to Cook

What is different about knowing what to cook and knowing how to cook? In today’s world, we are inundated with recipes telling us what to cook (for dinner, as meal prep, as a quick lunch), as if the biggest roadblock to consistently cooking for yourself is deciding what to make, instead of knowing how to cook and enjoying it.

Instead, these options often create a glut of information that is paralyzing. We must make something fast and easy, but delicious and satiating, but also exotic and novel, but also comforting and familiar. It’s exhausting. The pressure to make something good comes with all that the idea of goodness entails - the moralizing and people pleasing, the subjectivity and its need for objective value. Usually we end up forgetting what foods we like in the first place and rarely do we enjoy cooking.

Feeding ourselves is perhaps the oldest form of self-care that there is. It’s incredibly important not only for us, but for our loved ones and those who rely on us, that we can make a satisfying meal. And yet fewer and fewer people have the ability. If we think about someone who is a good cook, it often seems as if that person has more of a magical ability than a learnable skill. We can’t understand how they make something delicious seem all too easy. They never even use a recipe, yet it always turns out! How do they do it? Were they taught as children? Well, usually, but not always. Learning how to cook isn’t difficult, most people just don’t have anyone to teach them how.

When I read recipes I’m usually only skimming through the ingredients to get rough amounts and I very rarely look at the steps. Why? Because I know how to cook. I’m familiar enough with the order of operations, so to speak, to confidently cook most things. There are of course exceptions for extra complicated, technical recipes, but even with baking, I know pretty much what I am doing. Some of this I picked up cooking when I was younger with other women who were accomplished home cooks and some I’ve picked up working in restaurants and developing retail food products. What has consistently surprised me is how little information there is out there about the order of operations and the technique of cooking. In other words, how little information we get on how to cook.

The lack of information on technique is often attributed to two things – 1.) the content of numerous recipes based on trends is much greater that the content of how to cook things well. Which means that you get more material and advertising potential if you create a need for recipes. And 2.) recipes and most food blogs advertise themselves by touting that they are “fast and easy”. Now what does “fast and easy” mean? Usually that the recipe isn’t accurate. A well-known example of this is the misrepresentation in recipes of how long things take. If you make one of these recipes the result is often little like it was advertised and you’re left thinking that you must have done something wrong but you don’t know what it was. Caramelizing onions is a great example of this. To caramelize onions, you have cook them for a minimum of 40 minutes, period. Can you imagine if a recipe said this instead of “sauté onions until caramelized, 5 minutes”? The recipe would not be quick and easy and probably wouldn’t get clicked. Another example is how hot you need to get your pan and how hot most “quick” food is cooked. An old saying I like that isn’t used as much anymore is “cook over a brisk flame”, which in recipes is invariably stated as medium. Realistically, many things get cooked on very high heat with an attentive pair of eyes watching. And attentiveness isn’t exactly “easy” either, is it?

Despite how many recipes that tout this “quick and easy” mentality, there are many home cooks I know that don’t want a 20-minute meal, they want to know how to cook. They want to feel comfortable and confident in a kitchen. They want to know how to make any given braised meat dish rather than knowing how to make the best coq au vin or tagine. But there isn’t a way for them to learn how to cook anymore. Cook books used to be better resources for this, but often the older books are strictly French, focusing on what is called French technique, (useful but not the end all be all of cooking techniques) and are now needlessly expensive. Modern day cookbooks focus on one type of cuisine (i.e. North Indian) or one type of food (i.e. soups). Even online websites will have seemingly a whole article before the recipe telling you how to make it, but it feels specific to that recipe and is usually just too confusing if you don’t know what you are doing.

Another huge roadblock to confidently cooking is something I call “cooking with your eyes closed”. In other words, cooking without tasting. Usually this is because a lack of confidence – if you taste a dish midway through and it isn’t good, what do you do? Isn’t it just better to finish it and grit your teeth as you eat it, chocking it up to a bad day? Honestly half of cooking is “fixing” – dishes don’t taste amazing immediately. That is, knowing what something needs by using all your senses while you cook. What does it look like? What’s the texture? Smell? Taste? How can you be more fully present with your food as you cook it?

Ok, being present is all well and good, but it’s even more important to know how to respond to your senses. Which brings me to troubleshooting, i.e. how do we adjust for imbalance. If something is too dry, too salty, too acidic, or too sweet what do we do? These are skills that we don’t teach our home cooks and that we don’t learn. Depending on the type of food we grew up eating we might have a trick or two up our sleeve, but we don’t have an exhaustive list of what to do for every little thing that might go wrong, and even if we do its usually only for that “golden recipe”.

Now, even if you have a fool proof recipe if you have made it multiple times, you are probably used to some variation in flavor and I’m betting you think it is your fault, so to speak. But that probably isn’t the case. In a good restaurant, cooks are used to receiving product that has some variation in size color and taste. This could be because of seasonality, purveyor or even the variety we are using (did you know strawberries have very short season – so to accommodate high demand strawberry farmers grow different varieties throughout the year to have them continually available?). Even pantry staples have variation. What does an experienced cook do to keep dishes consistent? Well she’s going to be constantly tasting and adjusting not just her dish, but the ingredients she’s using. Even bakers and patissiers adjust their recipes with changes in humidity. These tweaks might be overkill for a home cook, but it pays to understand how much everything varies so that if something isn’t tasting right, say your carrots soup is more acidic than usual, you’ll know that your carrots are less sweet, maybe the variety you got is more fibrous and you can add some extra caramelized onion or sweet potato.

It’s this engagement that is the most important part of cooking. And how do you become engaged in the process? By enjoying it. To do this it’s important to divorce yourself from the exact science mentality and succumb to the unexplainable alchemy of cooking. You could control all variables and still come up with variation in flavor so why kill yourself with anxious measuring when you could just taste your dish. Ask yourself what is delicious? What do you love? What were the flavors that first spoke to you? Which ingredients excite you the most or feel the most exotic? If you pictured a Greek goddess holding out a plate of food to you, what is she offering?