Ten Essential Rules for Cooking Like a Chef

Ten Essential Rules for Cooking Like a Chef

These are the most compelling and universal lessonsTaken together, these tips should paint a clear portrait of what it means to know what you’re doing in the kitchen.

01 Taste as you go.

Cooking is not about blindly adding this and that and hoping that what you’re making comes out okay . Engage with the food you’re making and taste it every step of the way . When it’s not to your liking, adjust it. Chefs don’t measure how much olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, or vinegar they add to a dish; they use these to adjust food as it cooks. To enrich food, they add fat. To heighten the flavor, they add salt. For a spicy kick, they add pepper. And for a sour edge, they add acid. It’s not just a neat trick to know about; it’s your job to use these tools to make your cooking great. Once you understand that, your food will taste better forevermore.

02 Put ingredients on display.

Too many times, we shop with a recipe in mind and come home with bags of ingredients to make that recipe, and whatever is left

over gets shoved into the fridge. Great chefs and home cooks go to the market and buy what’s beautiful and in season. Then—and here’s the kicker—they display what they buy in baskets or bowls so that this food not only serves to make their homes beautiful (baskets full of radishes and turnips, bowls spilling over with

Meyer lemons), it serves as inspiration for cooking. Applying this to your own life, keep a basket on your kitchen counter and fill it with whatever you find at the market (purple potatoes, Bosc pears, parsnips, and apples in winter; heirloom tomatoes, chilies, squash, and corn in the summer), and use it to inspire what you cook.

03 If it looks good before you cook it, it will taste good after you cook it.

So many times chefs would assemble something that they were about to roast in the oven or steam in a steamer and they would say, “That already looks good.” It’s not an accident. Food should look good at every stage, and if it doesn’t look appetizing before you cook it, you may want to rethink what you’re making.

04 Use your internal timer.

Chefs were often amused as we cooked together because I’d nervously remind them that they had something in the oven. I’d fret when a timer wasn’t set. But all good chefs have a well-developed sense of everything that is happening in the kitchen at

all times. It’s encoded in their DNA. With practice, you can learn to have this internal timer too.

05 Control the heat.

Very rarely do recipes talk about that knob on your stove that controls the heat, but great cooks know that knob very well. Seldom do they set the heat to “high” or “medium” or “low” and leave it alone. As they cook, they monitor what’s happening and adjust the heat accordingly . Recipes can’t dictate a specific heat setting for every moment of cooking, which is why you have to be alert, pay attention, and adjust the knob based on what you observe going on in the pan.

06 Use your ears.

Food will speak to you if you listen. When you are cooking meat especially one can judge by its sound that how much more it needs to be cook .Your ears are an important tool for cooking.

07 Don’t use pepper the way you use salt.

Most of us who cook at home think of salt and pepper as a constantly complementary duo: wherever we put salt, we can also put pepper. But that is not often the case in the professional

kitchen. Most chefs rarely use pepper, and when they do, they use it in dishes that they think will benefit from a hit of the seasoning. Even then, they seldom use it at the beginning of the cooking process. Add pepper at the end of cooking just to impart some complexity and some heat.

08 Use the Internet.

There’s this notion that chefs are infallible, that when it comes to food, they know everything. That’s very much not the case. Most of the chefs are humble, always eager to learn more. And when they really don’t know something, they look it up on the Internet (just like most of us do at home).

09 Clean with fluidity.

Doing the dishes is the most dreaded of kitchen tasks, but one of the most essential lessons I took away from my time cooking with great chefs is that doing the dishes is not a separate act from cooking. It’s all part of the same fluid sequence of motions: mix ingredients in a bowl, dump the contents into a pan, put the bowl in the sink and run water in it while you put the pan in the oven. Then, while the pan is baking, wash the bowl and wipe down the counters (clean counters make cooking so much more pleasant).

Once you make cleaning part of your cooking process, you’ll find it difficult to do it any other way .

10 Remember, everyone makes mistakes.

On the subject of chefs being fallible, there were many times when a chef would mess up . The lesson is: no one cares if you mess up in the kitchen; it’s how you recover that matters most.