How can you get better at cooking?
August 13, 2021
Cookery is a skill that’s enormously consequential. If you don’t know how to cook, then your options when it comes to eating will be hugely limited. You won’t be able to properly control your nutrition. You’ll spend huge amounts of money on takeaways and microwave meals. And, perhaps worst of all, you’ll miss out on the fun of spending time in the kitchen!
Once you’ve gotten the knack for cooking things from scratch, you might want to build and develop your skills over time. But how, exactly, do you do that? Let’s take a look at a few strategies for building the skillset.
Invest in quality cookware
Getting great cookware in hand won’t make you a better cook, but it will help you to achieve better results, and make the experience of cooking that much more pleasant. You don’t want to be spending time hacking away at vegetables with a blunt knife. Getting a new non-stick pan set from Circulon will prevent food from sticking to the pan during cooking, and make life easier in general.
Cook what you love
If you’re enthusiastic about something, then you’re more likely to persevere. So, rather than try to get better at everything at once, it’s sometimes a good idea to really focus on one particular dish, and try to pick up every trick available. Today, we have access to video streaming sites like YouTube, where there’s literally more cookery videos than you could watch in a whole lifetime. It shouldn’t be too hard, therefore, to track down even obscure dishes, and pick up crucial tips.
Cook what you aren’t familiar with
If you stick to the same few dishes for years on end, then you’ll almost inevitably get bored. What’s more, your creativity will stagnate. By picking up new dishes, you might learn things that you can apply elsewhere.
Take salt seriously
If you’ve just been using the cheap salt that you get out of a store-bought grinder, then you might not appreciate what a difference the expensive stuff can make. Take a leap with a tub of sea salt and see what a difference it makes.
Generally speaking, most of us don’t use enough salt when we really need to. If you’re frying a steak, or boiling pasta, then you should remember that a lot of the salt you add is actually going to stay in the pan. Still, it’s worth being conscious of the recommended limit.
Cook bases
Many of the dishes you’ll find at a restaurant are actually variations on the same basic sauce, which is cooked in advance. To get the most from your kitchen, you might try the same thing. Home-made stocks, for example, are almost always preferable to the store-bought variety.