Cooking without a recipe can be terrifying, especially if you’re not the most confident chef in the kitchen. Questions like “is this the right pan for salmon?” “how long do I need to cook a steak for?” and “do these spices even taste good together” can shake your confidence and even deter you from embarking on exciting new culinary adventures.
Luckily, we’re here to tell you that cooking doesn’t have to be daunting. With a few simple tips, you can learn how to lean into your intuition, cook with confidence, and ditch your cookbooks for good.
Learn the cooking times for your ingredients
A general rule of thumb is that aromatics are typically the first thing a recipe asks you to cook. Onions, garlic, ginger, and spices release the most flavor when they’ve been sauteed for a while before adding any other ingredients. Conversely, ingredients like greens and delicate vegetables are typically the last thing added to a dish. If you’re making a stir-fry and add your broccoli, onions, garlic, ginger, carrots, bell peppers, and bean sprouts in all at once, you’re going to end up with a giant pan full of vegetables that are half overcooked and half undercooked. Once you understand how long each ingredient takes to cook, you can set timers to ensure that everything is perfectly cooked.
Have pre-made spice blends ready to go
Check out your local specialty grocery store and find spice blends that excite you, like harissa, jerk seasoning, za’atar, curry powder, and berbere. That way, you’ll know that your seasoning blend is perfectly proportioned. If you toss some za’atar into your potatoes before roasting, it completely transforms an otherwise simple, boring dish into a culinary masterpiece.
Taste as you go and layer your seasoning
You can always add flavor, but it’s VERY difficult to remove it if you go overboard all at once (especially when it comes to salt and spicy ingredients). Instead of adding a tablespoon of salt to your soup at the end of cooking, sprinkle some into the onions while they’re cooking and add more and more seasoning as you add more ingredients. If you’re adding flavor in increments and tasting as you go, you can feel confident that the final product will be in your control. There’s nothing worse than making a complete dish that’s been cooked perfectly but tastes terrible, or overwhelmingly salty.
Herbs and acid are your friend
One of the biggest hacks to making food that tastes vibrant and delicious is finishing it with fresh herbs and a hit of acid. A bland bowl of rice is instantly elevated with chopped cilantro and a heavy-handed squeeze of lime. Such a simple addition provides depth of flavor and nutritional benefits to boot!
Remove fear from the equation
Chefs cook from the heart and are constantly innovating and trying new things. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they don’t. That’s the key to cooking with confidence — knowing that every risk has a potentially delicious reward and if not, a lesson to learn from. Cooking is a mental game! Watch a few YouTube videos of a chef in their natural habitat, and you’ll see that they’re far from perfect. It’s also a great way to pick up on tips and tricks, cooking hacks, and flavor inspiration.
Now it’s time for you to put on your apron, get your chef’s knife out, and get cooking!
