How to Improve Your Home Cooking

You don’t have to go to cooking school in order to improve your skills as a cook. It doesn’t matter how good you are in the kitchen, you should always work on becoming better. Thankfully, there are a lot of easy ways to improve your home cooking.

Follow Recipes

Following recipes is the easiest way to make a delicious meal. This way, you will be following the steps someone else already laid out for you. Keep in mind that recipes are usually made of simple steps that anyone can follow. Nevertheless, you should know that you likely won’t get exactly what you saw on TV or in a picture online. Therefore, it's important to expect less than what is in the picture. In order to find some good recipes, you should consider looking for different cookbooks.

When you get bored with learning, you'll probably start experimenting on your own. Experimentation is the most interesting part of cooking. Experimenting by adding ingredients can be a bit tricky, so it's best to start with adding more or less of ingredients that are already used in the recipe.

Turn Down the Heat

If you're a busy person, you've probably experienced problems while trying to heat up dinner from night before. This is usually because you really turned up the heat, thinking it would speed up the process a bit. In the end, you probably burned food on the bottom, while the rest wasn’t even warm.

Turning down the heat is a crucial part of cooking. You can't have a decent meal by trying to speed up the process and increasing fire. Light fire is usually used in cooking, since the heat can slowly rise and warm the mixture from top to bottom. Turning up the heat wastes too much energy in a shorter time period, and makes you burn your food on the bottom while the top doesn’t even get warm. This is not only the case with the stovetop, but the oven as well. However, these mistakes usually don't happen with the stove, since most recipes have a predetermined temperature a stove should be set at.

Use Better Spices

Every spice has its taste, but they mix beautifully with food. This is because people have the ability to notice different ingredients. Therefore, you should really put some thought in before you start using spices. Too much of any spice takes over the food and it can end up tasting horribly. Stick to recipes to know how much spices to use. As time passes, you will get more comfortable with them, which will help you use them more freely.

However, the quality of the spices can also affect the taste of your meal. It's not about where you buy the spices, it's about their freshness. It's always better to pluck a branch of fresh rosemary than to buy it already grinded. Sometimes, it's the mixture that counts. Kosher salt can be used instead of regular table salt, and it provides clearer taste, since it has no Iodine.

Work on Your Reflexes

Preparing the ingredients before a cooking session can be helpful, but some meals require agility and speed. Therefore, you should stay focused on the meal and act quickly. While this sounds like an advice you'd give to someone in competitive sports, it's still a good tips for cooks as well. Keep in mind that cooking can be quite exhausting and it will require some stamina.

For instance, when you're cooking multiple things at once it's hard to stay focused on every pot. Reflexes come into play when you realize you have been paying too much attention to one dish. Every millisecond can be important at that moment, so you’ll need to act fast. After all, nothing is worse than a burnt meal.