some cooking secrets
For a long time I’ve known a huge secret about cooking. It’s one of the fundamental things I learned when I first began to cook as a kid and I’ve made it my mantra in and out of the kitchen. Without knowing this precious piece of advice, you cannot, in my opinion, successfully prepare food for yourself or the people you love. Are you ready?
In order to be a good cook, you have to cook a lot.
I can hear you now. “THAT’S IT?! That’s ALL you wanted to say?” Yes. It is. But take heed of the wisdom I’m sharing with you. It’s the absolute truth. And it’s not just that you have to cook a lot of DIFFERENT foods, you actually have to cook a lot of the SAME foods in order to get them under your belt. Here’s an example:
I loved pecan pie as a kid. But we always purchased it because my Mom seemed to think it was a lot of work. When I first moved out of my parents house, pecan pie was the recipe I instantly wanted to begin working on. I could cook general things at that time; eggs, meatloaf, steaks, simple casseroles, and lots of everyday food type things. But baking was a new adventure for me. Baking is 98% precision and 2% experimentation in my book.
So I set a goal for myself; learn to bake a pecan pie in 8 pies or less. Don’t ask me why I chose the number 8, but I figured if I hadn’t learned how to bake one by the time I made my 8th, I had problems. I didn’t do it overnight either. It took several months to work out.
I baked. And baked. And baked some more. Pie one was barely edible. Pie two was holding together better, but tasted funny. Pie three tasted more buttery. Pie four finally had good crust. Pie five was pretty damn good. From there I started playing. Maybe a bit of chocolate here. Some rum for the pecans there. What would a shot of espresso do to the filling? What about pureed raisins?
Pie 8 was glorious. It was a gorgeous perfectly delicious pie that I was very proud of. But the real lesson that I learned didn’t sink in until many years later. It wasn’t actually tinkering with the pie ingredients that made it good, it was making it over and over and over again. The PROCESS of cooking (because it is a process) must become second nature in order for the ART of cooking (it’s also an art) to shine through.
That’s the part that I think a lot of people are afraid of. They’re afraid to experiment because they are afraid of failure. But you have to fail now and again in order to learn from that mistake. And once you learn, you can move on.
Here’s the final thought for this long post. If you want to learn to cook, find something easy and cook it over and over again. Then find something else and cook it a few times. Then move on to another thing.
You really do have to cook a lot to be a good cook.