Most of us love the idea of cooking at home. Far fewer of us actually have the time to do it. Even if we do have some free time on our hands, the thought of patiently, incrementally learning the skills necessary to be a great home cook can be daunting.
Fortunately, being a competent home cook is not as difficult, nor as time consuming, as it might first appear. Countless people with no formal training or fancy culinary degrees make amazing meals at home every week — some, every night.
People like Ryan McCorvie, a statistician who fell in love with cooking years ago and hasn’t looked back. McCorvie and his fellow home cooking experts are eager to offer simple, common-sense tips for those ready to follow in their footsteps, regardless of skill level.
Here’s what McCorvie and other experts recommend.
1. Learn the Basics First
You can’t go from microwaving meals seven days a week to gourmet feasts overnight. Professional chefs train for years, after all.
So while it might feel frustrating at first, it pays to focus on basic culinary concepts first. Learn proper knifework. Perfect your mise en place. Get comfortable with cooking techniques like stir frying, simmering, and steaming. Practice makes perfect, as they say.
2. Cook Food You Want to Eat
It’s vital to acquire a representative range of culinary skills if you want to be a well-rounded amateur cook. But you’ll have more fun doing it, and probably get farther in a shorter period of time, if you do so while cooking dishes you truly enjoy. That way, you’ll never feel like you’re “working” in the kitchen.
3. Make Your Building Blocks From Scratch (Within Reason)
Think sauces, flour mixes, patties, fillings, and other multi-ingredient components of more complicated meals. This is the secret to executing restaurant-quality dishes (with matching complexity) in your home kitchen.
It’ll get easier as you improve your basic culinary skills. At first, though, it might seem like a real challenge, so it’s OK to “cheat” a bit.
4. Invest in High-Quality Cookware and Kitchen Tools
This is an underrated feature of high-performing home kitchens. Sure, you can make passable food with cheap, disposable cookware and cutlery, but those tools wear out faster and simply don’t perform at the level you expect them to. Invest in quality products: Sur La Table, Le Creuset, and the like.
5. Learn to (Really) Read Recipes
Another underrated feature of high-performing home kitchens: Cooks who really, truly know how to read recipes. It can be tempting to take any old Internet recipe at face value when you’re pressed for time, but it’s important to run each and every one through your BS detector to make sure it actually works.
6. Get to Know Your Home Cooking Equipment
Your stoves, oven, air fryer and pressure cooker work more or less the same as your neighbor’s. Right?
Maybe not. Silly as it sounds, many home cooking implements have distinct “personalities” that influence how they operate (or don’t). For example, unique convection patterns mean some ovens have “hot spots” on the top or bottom rack, or maybe just in a certain corner. Pressure cookers might respond in unexpected ways to weather conditions. The list goes on, and it helps to have a good sense of how your own equipment will behave — something that can only be done with experience.
What’s Your Secret Sauce?
Experienced home chefs like Ryan McCorvie rarely fail to note that amateur cooking is a lifelong journey with no clear end point. That’s what makes it so rewarding — and, yes, sometimes frustrating.
As with any hobby, it helps to be realistic about how quickly you’ll acquire new cooking skills and how much work it’ll take to perfect your favorite dishes. In fact, you should think twice about the idea of “perfecting” anything, as even the world’s best professional chefs are constantly refining and improving their signature dishes.
Most importantly, it’s best to embrace the fun of home cooking, warts and all. After all, what use is a hobby if it doesn’t bring you joy?
Leave a Reply