being able to cook well for yourself is perplexing. here are a few reasons and their answers.
you need to do more recipes
literally just numerically, if you want to learn to cook, follow more recipes. how everyone pretty much does it is you follow recipes and follow recipes and follow recipes until you start to see the patterns. then you start to blend recipes together. no one does a recipe and memorizes it immediately, we all look up the recipes from nyt cooking for stuff we havenât cooked in a while. even if weâve cooked it like 5 times, sometimes we forget the details. but when youâve cooked something like 10 times, thatâs usually when it locks in.
to do more recipes, you need to understand realistic kitchen stocking
people have this misnomer that to be able to cook, you need to have every esoteric ingredient in your pantry at all times. then they get frustrated because the pound of holy basil you bought for one red curry is going bad in your fridge, and you have no idea what to do with this much shaoxing cooking wine, or black cumin, or guajillo chiles, or saffron. bro, real kitchens do not have everything all the time. your parents used to have some 10-15 dishes that were their constant rotation. every kitchenâs pantry is aligned around whatâs in its common rotation. this is why in an american household, turmeric is an exotic ingredient that you might have to consider if youâre only going to make a dish one time, while in a desi household turmeric is always kept stocked.
bro please learn to freeze stuff
if you grew up in a family of at least 3, youâre probably unfamiliar with how critical your freezer is to ingredient management because when you cook for 3 more every day, ingredients rarely last long enough to need to be frozen. when you cook for less though, you commonly have ingredients that you frustrated are so expensive to buy and you canât even use them before they go bad. bro, please use your freezer. you can freeze SO many more things than you ever thought was possible. milk going bad? boil and freeze it. one-shot herbs you needed? freeze (or dehydrate). vegetables you only need slowly, like ginger, garlic? freeze em. they will last months and retain like 80% of the flavor. make extra rice and freeze it so if youâre ever lazy you can just reheat. extra anything you make really, like most stuff can be frozen. half open cans of tomato paste.
practice effective substitutions
also in a real kitchen, you rarely have all the actual ingredients you need. you need to be able to do substitutions effectively. this requires tasting a lot of ingredients to be able to know what they bring to a dish, and knowing basic cooking chemistry to achieve results in other ways. the first thing is pretty obvious, most ingredients are used because they taste like something, and the ingredients that make up a dish are used together because all of those flavors together are harmonious, like a chord. chipotle peppers in adobo taste good, but we donât put them in chicken marsala because that dish is about a tangy, bright chord, and chipotle peppers would be discordant, even though theyâre the star of chipotle chicken. you have to know the taste of stuff to be able to think of things that taste similar, so taste everything. sometimes you can make omissions, like nothing really tastes like bay leaves, but also bay leaves are a very subtle flavor/mouthfeel that make a 2% improvement in your dish. therefore if youâre just trying to make a dinner for yourself, or if youâre still struggling with 20% fish like managing temperature in the pan, you can really omit the bay leaf if you happen not to have it. other times, you can imagine it like how if one note goes well in a chord, another could fit right in, like how a C chord can be played with add7 or add9 and both are acceptable. this is like italian dishes where if you donât have sage to be your forward herb star, you might be able to get away with making marjoram the herb star instead; but only if your other ingredients support it. like chicken would probably be amenable to that, but shrimp might not, because of how they pair. even other times, maybe thereâs no single ingredient replacement, but two ingredients together can simulate one, like how if you donât have shallots you can sometimes use a mix of finely diced garlic and onions to get a similar taste. learning how stuff pairs is mostly by tasting both ingredients close together and imagining if they would taste good together, do this a lot. and when you follow recipes, youâll gradually build up a sense of ingredients that are commonly paired together; you are standing on 6000 years of human cooking experimentationâs shoulders. some stuff we just figured out and itâs standard now.
the second thing is functional ingredients. like when you add flour to a sauce, you donât really taste the flour at the end, itâs function is to make the sauce thicker so that it coats the food and your tongue, transmits flavor better, makes more filling food. if you donât have flour, you need to know other techniques to accomplish the same thing that flour is doing in that recipe. for thickening a sauce, you could use corn starch, potato flakes from a mashed potato box, etc. it wonât be the exact same â corn starch will make the sauce glossy like in asian sauces, and potato flakes will bring the slight potato taste, but maybe this can be acceptable it depends on the dish. this is just stuff you learn from doing recipes and watching binging with babish, where he talks about âbasic techniquesâ a lot. good cooks know a lot of techniques so that if they canât do one, they can figure out other techniques to do the same job.
put yourself in a time crunch to force yourself to go fast
a lot of people donât cook because it takes too much time. but tbh, your dishes are probably taking 1.5x as long as they need to because you donât have a time crunch. this is mostly why momâs become excellent cooks. once you have the stress of two hungry kids waiting to be fed, all your dilly-dallying suddenly evaporates as if by magic. youâll be so surprised how many tricks are laying around in your brain to defrost chicken faster, cut vegetables faster, multiplex two different parts of the dish at the time rather than doing them one after another; all you need is a little time pressure. if the recipe claims 20 minutes active time, set a timer and try to do it in 15. keep the clock in front of you so that you can keep your pace. âi donât cook for myself because it takes too longâ will vanish pretty fast when you realize you could make a delicious chicken marsala in actually the same time it would take for doordash to arrive if you wanted to. watch ethan chleblowskiâs videos on this, although tbh even he goes slower than i would sometimes.
take the load off yourself: reuse
related to the above, a common complaint along with too much time is too much effort. too many pans involved, too much cleaning. too many little bowls to hold on my ingredients. brother, mise en place is nice and helps with preparing a dish where timing is critical, but you absolutely do not need to involve 5 different bowls into your weeknight chicken and rice. along with effective time multiplexing, learn effective space multiplexing. this is things like: when youâre making two parts of a dish that are going to come together anyway, you donât need to clean the pan in between. also, when youâre making one dish over and over (like eggs for breakfast most days) you donât need to clean the pan over and over. you can just have an egg pan on your stove 24/7 that you use for making eggs. oil doesnât go rancid that fast, especially when youâre ship of theseusâing it by adding another tablespoon every day. just save the effort. chicken fond left in the bottom of the pot? make the rice in the same pot and get a little of that jus in there. worst case, it doesnât add anything, best case you get umami rice for free. and you saved the pot wash. cut all veggies on your cutting board first, use a bench scraper to transfer to pot, then slice your meat. one wash instead of two. etc. etc. we wash kitchenware mainly to 1) prevent germs, and 2) prevent mixing flavors we donât want to mix. if the germs donât matter (something is about to get nuked to 400 degrees in a few minutes anyway) or the flavors are complementary, you can skip the wash and reuse.
getting better at any art is about successively caring about smaller and smaller details
as you get better at anything, you successively work on optimizing smaller and smaller details, as the bigger ones start to become automatic. for example in programming, you often see junior engineers struggling and thinking really hard about how to structure a certain program. theyâre focusing on this so hard that they canât care about smaller details like variable naming, spacing, readability etc. but when you program as a senior engineer, you have practiced and written so many programs that writing a well structured one is automatic. you donât even think about it. as you start writing, you canât even really fathom any way to do it except the right way. but you think hard about the smaller stuff, because thatâs somewhere you can get better. a junior engineer watching a senior engineer has their jaw on the floor. to him, the seniorâs brain must be working at a million miles per hour to both plan the structure of the program and have the ability to make it look good â caring about small details like naming, spacing, and readability. but it isnât going a million miles per hour. the big stuff is automatic now. same goes for cooking. you watch gordon ramsey in awe of how he can manage 4 stoves and think creatively about the plating of a dish and know how to make it look good even if heâs never cooked it before. but really, heâs not even thinking about those 4 stoves, thatâs automatic. and for plating the new dish, heâs thinking about extrapolating methods and tricks that heâs learned from other dishes to create a new composite thing with the problem given of the new dish. thatâs where his brainpower is going.
in cooking too, you have a lot to learn. when you ask someone about why your eggs are burning, you might be thinking on the order of maybe my heat is too high or too low. you might be shocked when a seasoned chef responds saying all these possibilities like time, pan shape, heat capacity, water content, when you added salt, what type of eggs you used, what stirring pattern, etc. your mind might boggle. do they really think about all this stuff every time they make eggs? you might lash out âyouâre overcomplicating it, itâs just eggs.â and what youâre saying is true. truly, you donât need to think about egg water content to make an egg on a stove, obviously. but at the same time, there is a difference between the eggs you make and the eggs that jacque pepin makes. forgive the experts. they have been at it for so long that their brain just works like this. itâs not that theyâre thinking about all of these things every time they make an egg, itâs that managing all of these things is so practiced for them that itâs automatic, and they only resurface when theyâre trying to debug something that has gone wrong. if i make an egg and it comes out watery, it evokes in my mind the first time i made an egg that came out watery, and how i researched and asked questions, and learned new esoteric details about how salting at different times changes the egg protein consistency. i laughed, i oohed, i aahed. and then the next time i made an egg, i tried something different based on what i read and it was successful. since then, i automatically do it that way without thinking, and you marvel at how my eggs come out 60% better than yours. itâs a summation of tricks that made my eggs 20% better, then 10% better, then 5% better, then 2% better, and so on.